10Feb06 — 6

Obviously We’ve Been Missing That Kevin Keegan Factor

Bored with an England football coach who hardly ever loses a competitive game and irritated by his getting more sex with hot foreign babes than they ever will, tabloid journalists (and many of their readers) finally get what they wanted all along:

England’s new manager to be homegrown: British or Irish candidate with ‘passion’ a priority

I can see the interviews now:

“Yes, yes, José, your understanding of the latest techniques in physiological acclimatization and your multilingual communications skills are all very well, but, basically, at the end of the day, we’re looking for someone with a Northern accent who CAN SHOUT A LOT and barely speak English without resorting to footie clichés. And it would also help us a great deal if you can sign the “one once-glamorous blonde wife and no girlfriends” clause in our contract with a clear conscience.”

I hope England win the World Cup. PooterGeek will be dishing out the humble pie again with serious “passion”.

Do you feel any better about your Quattro Stagioni tasting like shit if the menu claims the people making it are “passionate about pizzas”? No. It’s not about passion; it’s about winning. Passion is what Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards had; winning is what Steve “let’s crush some dreams” Redgrave did.

09Feb06 — 3

That Grammy Awards Dyed-Hair Rockers’ Medley In Full

THE EDGE: dicka-ticka-ticka-ticka [dicka-ticka-ticka-ticka] [[dicka-ticka-ticka-ticka]] [[[dicka-ticka-ticka-ticka…

BONO: And the Devil touched the angel in the middle of the desert…

BROOCE: Bwangggg! …in the shadow of the foundry, in the shadow of the flag…

ELVIS COSTELLO: …and the angel was a s-s-s-squaddie and the Devil was Thatch…

LORD MACCA OF LOCH KODAK: …and the little green frogs sang, “Get back! Get back!”…

NIGEL GODRICH [into MACCA’s in-ear monitors]: It’s just not happening for me, Paul: I need to hear more angst, man.

MACCA: …but the vomiting yuppie pigeons were fucking creeps!

THE EDGE: [[[[[[dicka-ticka-ticka-ticka]]]]]]

MARIAH CAREY: Eee-ooh-oo-ah-aaah! Baaaaaay-beeeee!

EVERYONE: I thought we agreed no girlfriends?!

STING: …Jah-meh-ki-an pigeons, Jah-meh-ki-an pigeons, just like in that book by Anthony Giddens…

ELVIS PRESLEY: …Uh-huh, uh-huh, but ah sho’ don’t see no loving doves on the Mare Nubium …

STING: …Giant leks are where they mate, walking on the moon…

BONO: …The moon that shone the night Jesus lied, the night my father cried…

THE EDGE: [[[[[[[[[[[[dicka-ticka-ticka-ticka]]]]]]]]]]]

LORD MACCA OF LOCH KODAK: …but my Auntie Edie’s knocking on the door with a cheeky Scouser grin…

NIGEL GODRICH: Angst, man.

MACCA: …she’s shouting, “Let me in! Let me in! It’s raining blood!”…

ELVIS COSTELLO: …blood and chocolate, coal and cream, dying here in Maggie’s dream…

BROOCE: …a dream of driving, a dream of striving, on the edge of a broken town…

BOB DYLAN: …nghhngn nhhgggn neeearrhhh nnnnhrnnn…

THE EDGE: [Adjusting his woolly hat, having not touched the strings of his guitar for the past two minutes] [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[dicka-ticka-ticka-ticka]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

(cont. bar 94)

08Feb06 — 9

Comic Booked

Yes, even Hello! magazine would have difficulty finding his good side, but you have got to admire the Beeb’s front-page photo of Abu Hamza:

Abu Hamza lit from below by Hammer Studios
This time you may have triumphed, Captain Britain, but I shall RETURN! Muaha-ha ha-ha ha HA HA HA!
07Feb06 — 0

Another Warning

This post is to echo the message Norm kindly hosted for me earlier today when I was offline: this week you should expect the signals from PooterGeek to be unreliable any time up until Thursday midnight because my Web hosts are upgrading the software running their servers. You can, however, count on the content here to remain as shoddy as you have come to expect. During this period make sure that you intermittently copy the text of any long comment you write before you hit ‘Submit’ or your words might be eaten by the Data Monster. The management takes no responsibility…

07Feb06 — 0

Thank Heaven For Little Boys

From 70s pop stars to Lib Dem MPs to celebrity feminists, the modern public figure seems to be vulnerable to private temptation by the figure of the young man. Everyone knew Germaine Greer’s battiness had set in properly when she wrote that book about beautiful boys, though the female circumcision thing had already given the more alert a clear signal. (Kirsty Young’s voice on Radio 2 reached new heights of sexiness on Sunday as she ranted against Greer’s piece in the Observer about Big Brother winner Chantelle, accusing the frizz-brained Greer of damaging the cause of women by “celebrating [Chantelle’s] pig ignorance” from Greer’s comfortable position of always having had access to the best education.)

Now Naomi “Harold Bloom touched my thigh” Wolf has lost it so completely even her fans might start to notice (though it took me days to hear about it):

Naomi Wolf, one of America’s foremost feminist thinkers, has found a spiritual awakening in God after experiencing a “mystical encounter” with Jesus.

Wolf, best known as the author of the Beauty Myth, a groundbreaking 1991 polemic against the cosmetics industry that radicalised a generation of young women, revealed the cause of a hitherto unexplained mid-life crisis that set her on a “spiritual path”.

In an interview with the Sunday Herald, Wolf spoke publicly for the first time about her vision. Her comments will spark a theological skirmish in the United States and leave her open to further attacks from other feminist critics.

Wolf admitted that, during a therapy session to treat writer’s block, she encountered what she described as a holographic image of Jesus.

“I actually had this vision of Jesus, and I’m sure it was Jesus,” said Wolf. “But it wasn’t this crazy theological thing; it was just this figure who was the most perfected human being that there could be—full of light and full of love.”

More bizarrely, she experienced this as a teenage boy. “I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him and feeling feelings I’d never felt in my lifetime,” said Wolf. “[Feelings] of a boy being with an older male who he really loves and admires and loves to be in the presence of. It was probably the most profound experience of my life. I haven’t talked about it publicly.”

[via Dr Frank]

07Feb06 — 7

Breakdown Of Diplomacy

While I’m on the subject, during much of my youth, lazy, stupid, ungrateful, talentless, illiterate, violent, and very very ugly white people would daily tell me to fuck off “back home”. They were wrong to do so. They would, however, be right to tell the sorts of lazy, stupid, etc brown people who wave banners like these

Islamists on the streets of London promise us death

or sympathize with their message to fuck off to the sort of place where this kind of behaviour

The Danish Embassy in Syria burns

is tolerated by the “authorities”—closer to the Stone Age where they belong, rotting in their self-imposed ignorance and hatred.

I hope that hasn’t offended anyone.

06Feb06 — 0

A Sierra Leonean Education

Here is the BBC’s recent picture gallery about education in Sierra Leone.

The Benevolent Kumrabai Rogbanah School was once a train station. The children have never seen a train—the railway closed in 1974. It is a reminder of how prosperous Sierra Leone once was.

The conditions are cramped with some children forced to sit on the dusty ground. But they consider themselves lucky to have a building of any kind and are quite proud of it.

Teacher Amandum Seray said, “It is very difficult, we don’t have enough teachers or space. But we manage, we always have to.”

Around 1974, thanks to my mum teaching me to read at home, I was happily working my way through every book I could get my hands on. At my state infants school in Tamworth, I was slowly going out of my mind with boredom.

To this day my sister sleepwalks. One evening, aged three, she made her way down the stairs in one of her trances with a pile of books in her arms and said, “I want to learn to read like Damian”, so my mum taught her even earlier.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Thanks, mum.

06Feb06 — 9

A Clarification

An earlier post of mine might have been construed as criticism of respected rapper and member of the community of People Of Colour Notorious B.I.G.. Since writing that entry in my Weblog I have been informed by two of my readers that Mr B.I.G. is, in fact, deceased. I think I and everyone here will agree that his contributions to the performing arts and the recording industry will be recognized for centuries to come for their profound musical importance and their impact upon fields as wide-ranging as philosophy, literature, and geophysics. Our thoughts are with him, his family, and his crew at this difficult time.

06Feb06 — 0

He’s Sharper Sober

Via Botheration comes this nice Charles Kennedy, er, come-back recorded by The Independent reporting on his meeting the people:

Mr Kennedy was greeted warmly… ‘I love you, Charles,’ said one elderly lady pushing to shake his hand. “Don’t start any tabloid scandal,” he said.

06Feb06 — 6

Yo Ho Ho

Mainstream hip-hop has become cock rock in blackface. Twenty years from now we will look back and laugh ourselves silly that it was possible for a lardy munter like the stupidly named “Notorious BIG” (that’s “Bee-Eye-Gee”, ladeez) to be Number One in the UK charts with an unironic Feed-The-World style ensemble display of sexual bragaddocio like Nasty Girl. With lyrics* that rival those of Spinal Tap’s Sex Farm for fist-shaped innuendo, fatboy and his similarly overpaid (and sadly oversexed) “homies” jostle to outdo one another in their tales of groupie-groping. Just like the guitar-wanking, big-haired honkies that preceded them, the depressing truth is that they are almost certainly not making up their tales of sexual conquest.

So, am I just a sad stay-at-home loser poisoned by envy? Yes. Is the resulting recording a steaming pile of horse manure? Yes. In a couple of decades will B-I-G have his own Osbournes-style reality TV show? [Actually, no. He’s dead. See comments.] Please, God, no (if only because this will mean his missus will wind up judging some godawful “talent” contest in which various multi-ethnic proto-divas wander up and down the Gospel scale in search of Meaning).

*[Isn’t it cute that the site I linked suggests that “[v]isitors interested in Notorious B.I.G. Lyrics may also interested in: Dire Straits lyrics”?]

06Feb06 — 1

Hi, Message; Meet Medium.

Also via Tim Worstall, would you hire a “PR guru” who uses (at least) eight different fonts on his own homepage? Note that, underneath his Superhero Personality Test post, the next two items on Stuart Bruce’s site are about the messiness of the e-democracy Weblog and the importance of using plain text in email. Best of all though is that he sets his name and tagline—“the science of public relations down to a fine art”—in the really-ought-to-be-haram Comic Sans.

06Feb06 — 0

What Else Is There To Do In North Carolina?

Thanks to Tim’s Britblog Roundup I discovered Ivan The Terrible of Dies Irae today. He’s not very correct, but he is very funny. On Fabien Cousteau, son of Jacques:

Jacques Cousteau’s grandson, Fabien, is following in his illustrious forebear’s flippers by building a shark-shaped submarine. By means of this ingenious device he will get closer to his toothy subjects than ever before, without altering their natural behaviour in such circumstances: ie, to immediately rip him limb from limb and swallow the still twitching chunks whole.

We await with interest the first time he uses the thing during mating season, whereupon death might suddenly lose its sting.

On Donald Trump, international icon of understated style:

…Donald Trump surfaces in a Time magazine article about effective working habits. He ascribes his phenomenal creativity and success (sic) to his strict routine of taking regular downtime for thought and reflection.

I’m sorry, but I don’t find this at all credible. A moment’s real introspection would immediately present him with two questions that he has quite obviously never asked himself:

a) why on Earth did I marry that hard-faced Czech bitch?

and

b) what the fuck is that thing on my head?

05Feb06 — 2

Bad Omen

It used to be a common pattern: first they’d misspell my name “Damien” and then they’d make a joke about 70s horror classic The Omen*. This has been fading lately, except with those of a certain age—step forward, Hak. Unfortunately, the self-eating content monster has finally got round to remaking the 1976 original. Here we go again. Luckily I’ve kept quiet about my middle name being “Chewbacca”.

*[I love that one of the reissues of the original went under the chilling title Omen I: The Birthmark.]

04Feb06 — 0

Manufacturing Consent

At least two of the broadsheets have had agony columns that invite readers to respond with answers to other readers’ problems. A few years back one (I think it was the Guardian) printed a letter from a woman despairing of her live-in boyfriend ever “growing up” and marrying her. The majority of the female contributors suggested that she “accidentally” got pregnant so that he would “commit”. Today the Telegraph started its “Dear Graham and Ruby” column in which TV slebs Graham Norton and Ruby Wax deal with readers’ woes. Here’s one of Ruby’s:

Dear Ruby,

I’m desperate to marry my boyfriend, but despite him saying he loves me no mention has been made of marriage, or starting a family. Friends have said that I should get pregnant by mistake/on purpose, and not tell him that I’ve gone off the pill. Would this be a dishonourable thing to do?

People say that sometimes men have to be forced to understand the predicament of women, and their biological clock, or they never will. Pippa B, Harrogate, Yorkshire

Ruby Wax:

Dear Pippa, If he hasn’t mentioned marriage or family, why can’t you? Now here’s the important part. Don’t whine, nag or bring it up in that nauseating way they do on television soaps. Whatever you do, do not mention the biological clock – he will bolt.

The quickest way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach, it’s by making him laugh. Have a sense of humour and you will get what you want. (Warning! Only use this method before, not during, sex.)

Seventeen years ago, I was getting long in the tooth and I told my then boyfriend that I had an opening to marry him on April18. If he was interested, fine, if not there was a whole queue of other men who would love to take his place. Luckily, he didn’t check and I got him down the aisle on that date.

P.S. I also got pregnant by accident (not). If you can’t think of anything funny, this method definitely works, too. Believe me, by the time the baby is a year old, he will love it more than you and you’ll laugh about it when you’re fifty. Maybe.

Dear Uncle Agony

My girlfriend won’t sleep with me. I’ve tried everything but she won’t put out. Women just don’t understand the biological urges of men.

Frustrated

Dear Frustrated

Rape her. She wants in really. In a few years time she’ll look back and laugh. In case she doesn’t find it quite so amusing, just make sure she was too drunk to object at the time.

Uncle Agony

04Feb06 — 2

Beyond The Pale

Boing Boing has an item about how “frighteningly easy” it is to use FedEx to send stuff to Afghanistan. Apparently it’s also “frighteningly easy” to send things to Rwanda and Bhutan. Since my mum was on the phone to me earlier this week wondering how she could send some prints of my photos of Maisie and Sam to Auntie Clarina securely, I decided to ask FedEx if it was frighteningly easy™ to FedEx stuff to Sierra Leone. Their Website said: “You couldn’t pay us enough, sunshine.”

Maisie has yellow hair

(Maisie, incidentally, has shrewdly been insisting that her hair lately is “yellow”, rather than allowing herself to be too closely associated with the word “blonde”.)

03Feb06 — 4

Honest!

Writer (and prolific Harry’s Place commenter) SeanT, aka Toffee Womble, is also displeased with the lack of fact-checking in contemporary publishing that led to the success of the largely made-up James Frey memoir A Million Little Pieces:

The second reason I am personally pissed off with James ‘I spent eight minutes in prison’ Frey is that I have/had a second memoir in the pipeline. This memoir was going to detail all the bad stuff in my life. The really bad stuff. The heroin addiction, the crack habit. Because I have had a life as crazy if not much crazier than the life detailed in Frey’s bestseller. The difference between my life and Frey’s ‘life’, however, is that mine is fucking TRUE. I really did do two months in prison – and not for defacing library books – I was on a fucking RAPE CHARGE. I really WAS kidnapped by Hezbollah. I really DID get in a knife fight in Marseilles. I really DID live in a hotel in Bangkok that sold heroin on room service. I really WAS stranded in a forest in Siberia coming off heroin after being ejected from a troop train.

But who, exactly, after Frey, is ever going to believe me?

Assuming Sean’s ‘Blog photo represents some kind of default facial expression, imagine how he looked when he was TYPING ALL THOSE BITS IN CAPITALS.

02Feb06 — 4

Everything But The Goal

With a fierce flick of the bedside lamp switch, José’s broodingly handsome features were thrown into gloomy relief. In an instant Tami stirred beside him, her trim, petite body sweeping upward from the Egyptian cotton to wrap him in a supportive embrace. “What is troubling you at such an hour, my love?” she asked, watching his trembling hands sweep through his thick, steel-tinged hair.

“Oh, my sweet! I am perhaps the greatest football coach the World has ever known. I am certainly the best paid. I speak five languages. I am broodingly handsome. I am married to you, my darling, and we have two beautiful children. I own a Samsung D600 mobile phone with video capture. But for all this, for all my achievements in the most beautiful game, one thing still eludes me!”

“What is it, my heffalump?”

“I cannot win at Villa Park! Villa fucking Park! Aston shitting Villa! They are the penny-pinching definition of mid-table mediocrity. Their chinless, disloyal fans growl in their ugly Brummie voices like pigs at a trough. Their coach, he even looks like a pig. They have not won anything since Simon Le Bon had cheekbones! And yet, and still for all the resources at my disposal, all the glamour and talent in my finely-tuned and conditioned squad, they taunt me.

“They are like a fat simpleton with a bladder on a stick. ‘Hurr hurr,’ they say, ‘I have blobby stick. You cannot have blobby stick!’

“‘I do not want blobby stick,’ I protest, but deep down I know I am lying: I would sell my very soul for blobby stick!”

02Feb06 — 1

Topical Joke

Late one evening a burglar breaks into what he thinks is an empty house. As he cracks the safe in the main living room and reaches in to grab the holidaying owners’ jewels, a voice speaks to him from the darkness:

“Jesus is watching you.”

He turns suddenly and shines his torch around, looking for the source of the words. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else in the room so he decides he is just hearing things. Once he has emptied the safe, he walks over to another wall and finds an original Sickert hanging there. As he turns over the frame to remove the canvas he hears the same voice again:

“Jesus is watching you.”

He puts the painting back and scans the room more carefully with his torch at head height. In the opposite corner of the room he sees a cage. He walks over to find two African Grey parrots perched in the middle of it. The one on the left says, “I’m warning you, Jesus is watching you.”

Smiling the burglar asks, “So you‘re the voice of God then?!”

The parrot answers, “No, I’m Moses.”

The burglar points at the bird on the right and asks Moses, “That’ll be Jesus then, will it?”

The other bird says, “No, I’m Mohammed. Jesus is the Rottweiler.”

[adapted from The Motley Fool]

02Feb06 — 1

Holding Back The Years

A dermatologist explains to Rachel Johnson why even though yummy mummies look younger for their age than most of us, their cleaning ladies probably look younger:

“According to a longitudinal study of 1,826 Danish twins, about 40 per cent of the variations in perceived age (i.e. how old you look as opposed to how old you are) are down to environmental factors, and the headline-grabber was this. Yes, heavy drinking, smoking, weight and sun-worshipping have an effect. But they add only a scant year or two to your looks at 70. But being married, non-skinny, with fewer than four children, and in a high socio-economic group (i.e. me), should make you look, on average, a socking 7.2 years younger than you actually are.”

Read on for the punchline.

02Feb06 — 0

Unsung Genius

Richard and I have been experimenting a lot with musical rounds and vocal counterpoint lately, but never have we scaled the heights of P D Q Bach, “oddest and least loved of the twenty-odd sons of Johann Sebastian Bach”. How is it that I had never heard of the satirist and pioneer of the classical mash-up (and serious musical educationalist) Peter Schickele before his Radio 4 profile, yet Armando “will this do?” Iannucci is, if you please, the Oxford Professor of Broadcast Media?

01Feb06 — 3

Pretty Things

doctorvee’s ‘Blog is looking rather slick these days. He also has a link to “thinking chess” [you need to have Java installed, but it’s worth it] which is even slicker, so slick that it’s got me thinking about doing something I swore off years ago: learning another programming language.

Also via doctorvee, this pleasing tally [link broken as of 01:00hrs 02Feb06] for the Rectorship of the University of Edinburgh:

Boris Johnson: 969 votes — John Pilger: 4 votes

🙂

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