06Mar06 — 2

Shelf-Reflection

Two of the many dangers waiting for me on the road to the local supermarket are second-hand shops with tables full of old books outside them. I know that, if I am not strong, I will not only forget what I set out to buy, but will wind up wasting time, space, and money. There was a big new consignment in at one of them today. It looked like the result of a single clearout as the books were all in similar boxes and the contents of each one fell into three categories: books on British politics, science fiction novels, and doom-laden eco-tracts—back in the 70s we were all going to have frozen to death by the year 2000. Of course I came home with one six-for-a-pound bag. Chris Brooke will be round here soon to tell me that Marshall and Moodie’s Some Problems With The Constitution is rubbish. After a few minutes rummaging I began to build up a picture in my mind of the original owner of this collection. He is/was almost certainly male and probably a bit annoying, but he also seemed to me to be the sort of person you could have a reasonably interesting conversation with down the pub.

I don’t do this kind of thing usually because it is, to be blunt, wanky. Reading and learning should be worn as lightly as possible (especially in argument when agility is all), and people who drop the names of Great (Wo)Men they’ve read are worse than people who drop the names of celebrities they’ve met. I’m about to do both. The thing is, the books on my bookshelves are currently arranged by size, just as I unpacked them when I arrived here. (And, as my parents would tell you with a groan, most of them aren’t here.) I looked at the spines on one of the narrower shelves—in fact the leftmost, toppermost shelf; how random is that?—and was struck by how obviously “me” they are. They are a small slice through “my library” selected on the almost arbitrary criterion of size. Here they are, in the order they appear and completely unedited for public consumption:

The Iron Man, Ted Hughes [I loved this when I was a kid, but this is the slim, 80s Faber paperback with superb etchings by Andrew Davidson.]
A Sort of Life, Graham Greene [my dad’s favourite author—for obvious reasons]
A Secret History, Donna Tartt [I bought a copy of this for my dad too because he would appreciate the forest of classical allusions better than I did, but he’ll never finish it because it’s such a long haul and he’s glad to see the back of teaching English; that’s a shame because it’s a superb novel and it’s probably even better if you have some Greek and Latin.]
Lord of the Flies, William Golding [When I rule the world, my jackbooted goons will patrol the classrooms, forcing all children to read Golding, Levi, Conquest, and Orwell. Only in this way will my plans for a new utopia be realised.]
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke [This, War Of The Worlds, and The Time Machine: the most ripped-off science fiction stories of all time?]
A Concise Advanced Guide To MS-DOS, N Kantaris [Whaddidya expect? This blog isn’t called “PooterCoolPerson”.]
The Two Cultures, C. P. Snow [This is the CUP Canto edition with particularly unforgiving notes by Stefan Collini and a collection of contemporary responses to the famous lecture.]
Good Benito, Alan Lightman [a novel for physicists]
Trespass, D J Taylor [a novel that demonstrates how to write well about provincial life]
The Art of Genes, Enrico Coen
London: A Guide To Recent Architecture, Samantha Hardingman
Lying Liars And The Liars Who Tell Them, Al Franken [given to me by the Anonymous Economist]
Getting To Yes: Negotiating An Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher, William Ury, Bruce Patton [bought on the recommendation of a veh veh posh and eccentric woman I met in the King’s Road McDonald’s—she was right]
A Shite History Of Nearly Everything, A Parody [bought for me by a rellie]
George W Bushisms [vols 1, 2, and 3], Jacob Weisberg [another Christmas present]
The Rise And Fall Of Popular Music, Donald Clarke [even more vicious than I am about the state of popular songwriting since the arrival of rock—I blame the synthetic authenticity of “folk” music for starting the decline myself]
The Story Of Jazz: Bop and Beyond, Franck Bergerot and Arnaud Merlin
Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
An Awesome Silence, Eldon S. Davis
The Metrosexual Guide To Style, Michael Flocker [thanks, cs]
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, John Gray [a friend lent it to me, honest; the book says the same thing over and over again, but I have to admit that that thing it says is a terrible truth]
The Joys Of Yiddish, Leo Rosten [so I can understand the transmissions from headquarters]
A Historical Introduction To The Philosophy of Science, John Losee
Vote For… Who?, Jonathan Maitland [not read it yet, but I will—thanks, Dad]
The All-American Skin Game Or, The Decoy Of Race, Stanley Crouch [thanks, Judith]
Living German, R. W. Buckley [much better than the textbook I’d been given at school, of course]
On Tenderness Express, Maxim Jakubowski [picked it out of a remainder bin, but I should have left it there]
Design For A Life: How Behaviour Develops, Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin [bought it after I had dinner with Patrick Bateson once]
The Man Of Reason, Genevieve Lloyd [bought for me by a woman doing a Master’s in anthropology—going out with me was part of her fieldwork]
The Fabric Of Reality, David Deutsch [Deutsch might be the greatest thinker I’ve ever had the privilege to be lectured by]
The Spark Of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup, Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada

06Mar06 — 3

Slice’n’Dice

Flicking through the opinion pages of the Guardian this morning I can see there are going to be some busy bloggers today. I predict that, by lunchtime, David “we pick on Israel because it’s a democracy” Clark will be lying slumped over his PowerBook, killed in the Drawing Room with the Knife, by the Professor. Later, Gary “no, it’s because you is crap” Younge’s body will be in bloody chunks across the floor of Scott Burgess’s study after the Ablutionist has noticed Younge’s feeble and factually incorrect piece on political correctness and the Danish cartoons and Larry Summers, former President of Harvard. (Ironic since, as Harvard alumnus/a the Anonymous Economist has pointed out, there is a perfectly robust non-feminist case for the man’s removal.) Cover your eyes, blog-addicts; it’s going to be ugly.

04Mar06 — 9

Sky-Fairies Continue To Advise Leaders Of Free World

When I was about nine years old I told a bunch of advancing micro-racists that I wasn’t scared of them because “Jesus was on my side”. That the Son of God was shamefully absent throughout my subsequent twatting should have been a lesson to me then, but it was a few more years before I saw the light. Sadly, and no doubt to the excruciating discomfort of his entire public relations team, Tony Blair hasn’t quite wised up yet.

03Mar06 — 1

Serious Breakfast Mistake

Above the usual manufactured outrage headline on the front page of the Daily Mail this morning I read the following smaller banner:

He’s quizzed over £350 000 “bribe”. Their home is remortgaged three times in four years. Yet not once, says Tessa Jowell, did she ask her husband: “What the hell is going on, darling?”

Crikey. Imagine if all the Daily Mail‘s readers starting asking those sorts of questions of their husbands when they were being made to sign all that tiresome paperwork. The rag would fold in a week, brought down by an creepy alliance of the male memberships of Masonic lodges, golf clubs, and Conservative associations across most of the south-east of England.

[My writing this has nothing to do with the Mail Online’s bitchy and not even slightly yo-yo-ey “Nigella’s yo-yo figure” picture gallery.

Bastards.]

03Mar06 — 2

Fatuous Bint

Regular readers here know that I had little time for the argument that “we” had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had a strategic arsenal trained on Hoxton hidden under his various country homes. It’s been said that I’ve been quite rude about people who signed up too confidently for certain types of WMD-related bollocks, but not as rude as I have been about the ricotta-brained tossers who talk about Saddam Hussein being tragically misunderstood, while their organically-grown twins, Muji and Monsoon, run around laying waste to the Early Learning Centre. Instead, I cleaved to (what will one day be known as) the Berlinski position, that is I didn’t care if George W. Bush wanted to overthrow the Ba’athists because he didn’t like the cut of their uniforms, as long as he did it as soon as possible.

Having got that out of the way, I’d like to draw your attention to Lucy “not fit to breathe on Linda Smith’s microphone” Mangan, trying to be funny in today’s Guardian. (I must admit that she was funny a few days ago when she wrote a longer piece on the back page of G2, but I wisely chose not to blog that strange lapse at the time.) Accompanying a Phil Space article by Julian Borger, Lucy attempts to match Condoleezza Rice’s workout programme [scroll down page]:

There’s a momentary embarrassment when my legs give way as I walk to the mats, but I channel the spirit of Dr Rice, a woman rarely deflected from her goal—be it completing a set of core-strengthening reps or convincing a populace that invading a country less threatening than Belgium makes sense (and will again!).

Setting aside the “convince”-as-a-verb thing, I am assuming, as is sensible with any sideswipe by a Guardianista, that this is a reference to Iraq. I think, given the choice, Lucy and most of her sort would have preferred to be resident one scarily porous border from a “populace” containing, at worst, a couple of regiments’-worth of kiddie-fiddling chocolatiers hampered by having to groom their victims online with simultaneous Dutch/French instant messages than they would like to look over the fence at patrols of Saddam’s Soviet-armed thugs (now forced to find freelance work as independent contractors for Jihad International). Ever caught sight in a bookseller’s window of that slender but legendary collectors’ volume Tintin and the Flaming Oil Refinery? Ever see anyone run screaming from the Singing Nun?

[Note to self: rewrite last line of previous para at next opportunity.]

(Of course, if your home is not immediately adjacent to Belgium, but you live off a few square metres of these two-and-third million square kilometres then you might have a slightly different view about how much of a threat to your wellbeing Belgium is.)

Charlie Brooker, on the other hand, somehow manages to write a funny observational piece about giving up smoking, which is about as easy as composing an original pop song about unrequited love.

To get back to the subject of the article: she played piano to concert standard, held a professorship at Stanford, can figure-skate, and gets up at 04:30 every day to work out according to a programme devised by a US Marine. I bet Condi can do that thing where you balance lots of ten-pence pieces on your elbow and then catch them in your hand.

02Mar06 — 7

I Haven’t Got A Girlfriend Either

Bernd Schneider reviews Star Trek model kits:

The Enterprise-C is one of the very few starship model kits that can be recommended to beginners. It is also one of the best researched kits by AMT/Ertl. Provided the model is carefully painted, it may look very close to the actual studio model. The most annoying flaw, which unfortunately cannot be corrected, is the much too wide stern section and shuttlebay.

(Bernd’s probably living with a stunningly beautiful Austrian biophysicist who organised the 2004 Berlin Trek-Con and captains the University of Graz kickboxing team. A threatening comment from her will appear here within five minutes of him noticing the uptick in traffic to his site. If I’m lucky.)

UPDATE: casualsavant knows my dark secret.

02Mar06 — 1

The Great Silence

For some reason I am reminded by this trailer for the new comedy western Bandidas of the promotional material associated with the Razzie-award-winning Catwoman, material that substituted quotes from press reviews with stills of Halle Berry in a skintight leather catsuit. Bandidas looks rubbish, but the promo takes care to show us that the film contains a sequence in which Salma Hayek has an extended cat fight with Penélope Cruz and another in which the co-stars wear matching hot pink corsets and not much else. It’s the anti-Brokeback Mountain. Then again you can always claim, “Of course it’s an art movie: it’s got Sam Shepard in it and it’s a French-Mexican co-production!”

Salma and Penelope are hot

“No, girls, I’m English—so it’s definitely not a gun.”
01Mar06 — 8

The Da Vinci Lode

It takes nerve to claim in public you originally extruded the pseudohistorical baloney that was the meat in one of the worst-written bestsellers of all time, but if Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh win their case against Dan Brown it could be the beginning of a long haul. On the “3 for the price of 2” tables alone in Brighton Waterstone’s yesterday I found the following books for sale:

Codex by Lev Grossman:

A long-lost library. A priceless manuscript. A deadly secret.

The Magdalene Cipher by Jim Hougan:

co-author of The Genesis Code

The Secret Supper: A Novel by Javier Sierra (and illustrated with a print of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper”):

Mystery. Intrigue. Death. Can You Crack The Code?

Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights Of The Mind by Javier Sierra:

If you read one book with Da Vinci in its title this year, make it this one

—The Observer
28Feb06 — 3

magmavander, Please Read This

This is a message for magmavander in Hyères les Palmiers. I am trying to send you a link to another rough mix, but your wanadoo address is bouncing as non-existent. Please email me an alternative contact. Thank you.

22Feb06 — 6

Apparently Some People Update These Weblog Things Once A Day

Sorry, PooterGeekers. I do have a lot of ideas for things to write here, but I don’t have any time to write them this week. I don’t even have time to cut-and-paste a joke here as I usually do before I take a few days off from ‘Blogging.

Amongst other little chores I’ve been doing, yesterday I replaced the car I wrote off on the M11. My new one has an airbag.

I’ll share two things with you quickly before I go.

My dad recommends this piece of poetry David Irving wrote for his now twelve-year-old daughter:

I am a baby Aryan
Not Jewish or sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.

That’s certainly up there with the verse of that other keen amateur historian Harold Pinter.

And I liked this comment from the Slashdot story about Yahoo banning the string “Allah” from users’ screen names (tough news if your surname’s “Callahan”):

Yeah, the same three English teams always seem to get caught in the filtering software:

* Arsenal
* Scunthorpe
* Manchester-fucking-United

19Feb06 — 4

This Weekend’s Train Conversations

On the way to Hot Wheels‘ most excellent party yesterday I met an Englishwoman with a bass who plays in a New Cross bluegrass band. She was wearing an “I’m Up For A Chat On The Tube” badge that turned out to be a product of a conceptual art project to bring random people together. I am, of course, going to sign up for this myself tomorrow. Part of the randomness involves being asked to do things you have never done before—one week apparently, the artist organised a roller disco evening. One of my hardened southerner friends told me later to run away: “It’s a cult! That’s why we don’t talk to people on the Tube.”

Today I had a long and fascinating discussion with a traveller from the Netherlands. She told me about how when she was learning English in school (and I don’t mean university) her English teacher played her class the Charles and Camilla tapes to expand their vocabulary. Don’t you just love the Dutch?

17Feb06 — 9

Mixing It Up

You won’t be surprised to read that I thoroughly approve of miscegenation. One day the whole world will be beige. There will be no war, all corner shops will sell five-spice, and no one will be able to make a buddy movie featuring a funny black sidekick. It always made me smile that the genome research centre I used to work in was a Baskin-Robbins of two-scoopers: half-Chinese, half-Malaysian, half-Thai, half-Sierra Leonean.

Ros and Damian formerly of the MRCs genome centre

It’s therefore with great pleasure that I (belatedly) direct you to photos of the marriage of two of her musician friends taken by my cyber-chum Grace Tsai Moy. How often do you get to see a bindi and a flat cap under a chuppah?

Incidentally, many people believe that young mixed-race individuals are always beautiful. Sadly, like all hypotheses, this can be undermined by a single counter-example.

Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand

(When I googled for that image I also found this picture of a giant ferret called Ferdinand. Coincidence?)

16Feb06 — 4

The Disconnect Is Complete. The Solution Is At Hand.

Harry’s Place has a story from Islam Online claiming that Norway has brought in a law that punishes blasphemy by fine or imprisonment. There doesn’t seem to be any confirmation of this from any other source. This means we have reached the point at which we can read a report on an imaginary change in legislation in response to imaginary slights against the imaginary will of an imaginary god.

competitor in squealing competiton said to have been cartoon of prophet

I think I can see the way forward that guarantees appropriate respect to the different traditions that conflict in cases like this. Every time the fantasy-based “community” complains to those of us living in the real world of a crime against an imaginary entity we should offer them imaginary satisfaction. Whenever individuals from that community do real violence against us or our property in the name of an imaginary entity we should reassure them of their imaginary rewards in an imaginary afterlife and put them in a real jail.

15Feb06 — 13

The Ultimate Taste Test

This is too strange. Using digital photography, someone called Wojtek Kwiatkowski has found a way to recreate those paintings of horses they used to sell at the corner shop up the road from my parents’. Are the results weirdly beautiful or impossibly naff?

15Feb06 — 10

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

It’s like the holocaust. No, it’s like Soviet labour camps. It’s like all the baddest things that ever happened all rolled into one evil Blairite slippery end of the wedge of straw on the camel’s back. Bring me my blunderbuss, Elaine, and put another sandbag in the conservatory! I’ll shoot the last bally one of those Eurocrats before they put me on their multicultural political correctness register and force me to learn Arabic and wear a genetically-modified cotton burqa if I want to light up a Brussels-approved cigar in my own damned lounge. Soon you won’t be able to buy a G&T without showin’ ’em yer blummin’ retinas.

15Feb06 — 1

Laughter Lines

“Women chose funny men as relationship partners despite often rating them as less honest and intelligent,” the researchers said in the study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.

In other news:

Actor Tom Cruise has branded a story suggesting he is to split from pregnant fiancee Katie Holmes “100% false”.

The denial came after US magazine Life & Style printed a report suggesting the pair will separate after the birth of their child in the Spring.

…

Life & Style magazine said its story was based on information from unnamed sources described only as “multiple insiders”.

“We stand 100% behind our story,” said a representative for the magazine.

14Feb06 — 2

Bucks On A Till

A few months back I emailed some friends (one of them a Samuel L Jackson fan with a subscription to Empire) a link to this ‘Blog post about an upcoming movie that practically defines “high concept“: Snakes On A Plane, a film that Samuel L Jackson will appear in because of, not despite, its title. Since then, Snakes On A Plane has become a full-on Internet phenomenon. By the time it comes out later this year it will almost certainly have acquired negative pre-publicity of Waterworld-like magnitude and cannot, therefore, fail to make back the costs incurred in making it.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the guy who talked himself out of fixing the script might turn out, by writing about this experience, to be the cause of the success of the movie he walked away from—exactly unlike the way Pete Best made the Beatles global superstars. Josh Friedman has got to, at the very least, be given a VIP ticket to the premiere. Or perhaps he’s been in on the whole thing from the start.

4 words + 1 box-office name = ker-ching!

14Feb06 — 2

Thank You

It’s been years since I received an anonymous Valentine (the best kind, obviously), but today I got a particularly fine e-card from a mystery individual—it even had a lovely little jazz piano soundtrack. If the sender is reading this I’d just like to say thank you. It made my day.

13Feb06 — 8

Misunderstandings

I was browsing a newsagent’s shelf the other day at a rail station and noticed that, given the current unrest, February’s Wired has an unfortunate cover:

Wired showing a menacing Lego army

Ironically, as Slashdot notes today, the Wired Website carries an interesting report today on some research into misunderstanding the intended tone of emails. As if you needed telling, email messages are an extremely dangerous form of communication, even when you aren’t involved in fraud and corruption or spinning the news, much of the time people misread their tone:

“Don’t work too hard,” wrote a colleague in an e-mail today. Was she sincere or sarcastic? I think I know (sarcastic), but I’m probably wrong.

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

“That’s how flame wars get started,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. “People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance,” says Epley.

The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.

Of course, to misinterpret email you have to be able to read it in the first place…

13Feb06 — 2

Flaming Pants On A Stick

If any of you have been forced to look at the old, purple, Movable Type version of PooterGeek lately it’s because my hosts, who claimed they would have finished their upgrades by Friday, decided to move all my data to a new server this weekend. The first I knew about it was a note in my home directory saying: “We have moved your files. And perhaps renamed or deleted some of them. Hope that’s okay.” They have even created a folder called “deleted-by-ukshells”. You’ve got to admire their cheek if nothing else.

Please email me if anything else strange happens. Not that I have been able to receive any email since 11:00 this morning. I suppose that’s been upgraded too.

12Feb06 — 5

Explosives Experts

Brighton city centre, one block from the sea front: I am walking along the street on my way to deliver some film to a developing lab when I notice that two police have been called to deal with an abandoned suitcase. It has been left flat on its side in the middle of the pavement outside a hotel and a travel information office. The first one approaches it, talking into her radio. This is the town where they almost blew up Thatch. It’s the week of the cartoon controversy. There’ll be an armoured robot and a cordon of stripey white vans here before you can say “controlled explosion”, I think.

I am, as often, completely wrong. Instead of calling for the cavalry she kicks the suitcase repeatedly. Not having lost one of her lower limbs in a supersonic shower of six-inch nails or detonated a dirty nuclear device designed to rid infidel England of a large chunk of its gay population, she picks it up and the two WPCs head off on their way.

11Feb06 — 1

Lots Of Bollox

If you frequent the eBay auction site you will be familiar with the capitalist haiku that is the eBay feedback message, the window through which users signal to other users their experience of a seller’s or buyer’s reliability. The majority of feedback messages are boilerplate rendered in txt msg English:

Delivrd on time. Goods well pkged. Gr8 eBayer. Top seller. A+

These days, some buyers and sellers use computer programs to automatically fill in the blanks after their transactions have been completed successfully. But even the necessarily rigid frame of this medium—one line of no more than 80 characters—cannot limit the muse of a true gonzo artiste like “mr_bo11ox”:

Good, wholesome, nuggety seller. A+++

SELLA STOOD TALL & PROUD LIKE A BEACON OF HOPE TO THOSE SUFFERING FEAR + DESPAIR

YO SISTA! GET ON THAT TRAIN OF REPENTANCE BEFORE IT LEAVES YO’ STATION! A+ SELLA

Went the distance, now I’m back on my feet—just a man and his will to survive

FAST PAYER. GREAT BAYER. LEO SAYER.

Item never received. Apart from that, perfect transaction.

It was after winning THIS item, that I began regularly self-harming. Good sella.

Sella delivered item himself, arriving in an amazing 40ft motorised tin whelk!

Good item, price etc but BOWEL-SHATTERINGLY SLOW delivery. 6 weeks!

BRING THY CHILDREN UNTO ME AND THEY SHALT BE ‘REPAIRED’ (Derek 4:19)

A++ USA SELLA. However I’m giving a ‘protest neg’ over illegal US-led Iraq war.

“Is this guy a good seller?” IS J-LO A TALENTLESS BAGGY-4RSED WAILING BINT? YES!

BUSTY NAKED LESBIAN WARRIOR VAMPIRE SELLER OF DOOM! TERRIFIC! Ebay needs more!

Remarkably, item took a NEGATIVE AMOUNT OF TIME to arrive.

GREAT supplier of weapons-grade uranium 234. (and dance/house compilation CD’s).

Item parachuted into my yard by Russian fighter jet moments after payment – ACE!

[via The Motley Fool]

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