21Dec05 — 8

Beige Christmas

Further to Tim and Eric’s comments, some boring personal information. My mum is from Freetown, Sierra Leone; my dad is from Preston, Lancs. I was born in Nigeria. I left Africa when I was two and have never returned as an adult—even to visit. Since my cousins have all left, and my grandmother there is gone, the only surviving relative I know in Africa is my Auntie Clarina who is still in Freetown. You now have everything you need to steal my identity. And I now have two perfect excuses to put this photo up [note the alarmingly premature grey hair]:

a very young PooterGeek stands by his Christmas tree in the compound in Nigeria
“Hey, honeyz, come back to my crib and check my smoove white poloneck.”
[click image to enlarge]

Happy Christmas and New Year to you all!

21Dec05 — 8

Stander Delivers

I was asked at a recent party of ‘Bloggers why I don’t write more about Africa and in an email this week by a South African correspondent if I would write something about apartheid. In both cases I pleaded the deadly combination of ignorance and emotion. I just couldn’t write well about a continent I know so little of and about things that upset me so much. The nearest I’m going to get for the moment is to recommend a true crime film set in apartheid South Africa.

A female friend of mine describes the actor Thomas Jane as one of the few men she has seen on screen who looks “really hot” even with blond hair. If you are male and browsing the racks at the local rental shop with your girlfriend then you should use his hotness to persuade her to see past the macho packaging of the unfortunately named Stander. She’ll be glad you did because the film is nothing like the naff low-budget gangster “actioner” the cover makes out. If, afterwards, she falls for Jane, you can cure her by playing the interview with him included in the extras, during which his real voice is revealed as a kind of high-pitched Tom Hanks. In the movie he delivers almost every line in a butch Afrikaans accent.

Stander is mostly politically correct, but doesn’t fall into the trap I expected it to of painting its setting in black and white (though all the main characters are white). It does, however, paint the screen with lots of interesting filtered tones. I’m probably about five generations behind cinematographic technology so I expect they do this by tinting every frame digitally later. In twenty years time when its currently cool look is dated they should be able to go back their hard-drives (or data crystals) and release a new version of it with truer colour.

Stander is stylish, bleakly funny, and moving. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a very good one. Amongst other achievements, it depicts the bloody outcome of a township protest in a way that is shockingly realistic and at the same time terribly beautiful to look at. And Thomas Jane can act too—not that I am qualified to judge either his hotness or his accent.

[Sadly for some viewers the experience of watching this film will be marred by one of the central character’s occasional physical resemblance to George Galloway, but you must catch it anyway, if only to appreciate how awfully, awfully clever my headline for this post is.]

20Dec05 — 2

Beige Humour

Traditionally when posting gets thin around here I steal a joke from The Motley Fool, edit it a bit, and slap it up on PooterGeek so that everyone can complain about how unfunny it is in the comments until things get back to normal. I bet you can guess what’s coming next.

An old lady is very upset as her husband has just passed away.

She goes to the undertakers to have one last look at her dearly departed. The instant she sees him she starts crying. One of the undertakers strides up to offer some comforting words.

Through her tears she explains that she is upset because her dearest was wearing a black suit, and it was his dying wish to be buried in a blue suit.

The undertaker apologises and explains that traditionally, they always dress the deceased in black, but he’ll see what he can do.

The next day she comes back to take one last look before the funeral the following day.

When the undertaker pulls back the curtain, she manages to smile through her tears at the smart, tailored blue suit her dead husband is now wearing. She says to the undertaker, “Wonderful, wonderful, but where did you get that beautiful outfit?”

“Well, yesterday afternoon after you left, a man about your husband’s size was brought in. He was dressed in blue Savile Row. His wife explained that she was very upset as she wanted him to be buried in a black suit,” the undertaker replies.

The recently widowed woman smiles at this sad but lovely coincidence.

He continues, “After that, it was simply a matter of swapping the heads.”

19Dec05 — 2

Three Weekend Headlines

Truckers Pluck A Sculpture as Self Preservation Society executes audacious robbery.

Two vehicles gained access to the courtyard of the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, on Thursday evening.

Three men then loaded the huge statue of “a reclining figure” onto the back of a Mercedes lorry using a crane.

Officers investigating the theft believe it could have been stolen for scrap value.

The 1969/1970 work is 3.6m long, 2m high by 2m wide and weighs 2.1 tonnes.

One offender is described as wearing a hooded jacket and one a baseball cap.

The Mercedes is a flatbed lorry, possibly red with a crane on the back.

A second vehicle used by the men is thought to have been an old-style Mini Cooper, police said.

‘Monger ‘Blogger Shocker in Brighton & Hove as Geek and Kamm found on same side of argument about English style: Plain English Campaign condemns use of plain English. Again.

UPDATE: Bob Borsley, who has been very helpful in advising me about Noam Chomsky’s contribution to linguistics, draws my attention to this discussion of the Donald Rumsfeld remarks, by Geoffrey K. Pullum, co-author (says Bob) of the best grammar of English:

The quotation is impeccable, syntactically, semantically, logically, and rhetorically. There is nothing baffling about its language at all…. Hate Rummie if you want for political reasons, but don’t try to get grammar or logic on your side. There is nothing unintelligible about his quoted remark, linguistically or logically.

Muter Pooter Still Too Busy to write anything substantial on his own ‘Blog or even deal with comments.

15Dec05 — 2

Shh

Despite my best efforts, one of the regulars here stumbled upon the celebrity name of the child I wasn’t allowed to ‘Blog about in my anonymized post of this morning, so I’ve removed the story in question. Gah! Sometimes—just sometimes—I wish you lot were stupid. Apologies to the authors of the interesting comments that I pulled with it.

15Dec05 — 0

Normal Service Will Be Resumed Soon

Yesterday evening PooterGeek was down for several hours while my hosts did some maintenance. Sorry about that. It will probably also be quiet around here today while I back various files up in a locking-the-stable-door kind of way.

14Dec05 — 10

Top Tip For ‘Bloggers

Girls, please don’t all throw your virtual knickers at me at once, but I once reviewed a book on how to use Google for the UK UNIX Users’ Group magazine, subsequently republished in the official magazine of the American Accounting Association—or something like that. After reading the book, I became a Google ninja. By way of sharing my superhuman search engine assassin powers I now present an alternative to using Technorati (which hardly ever works) to find out which ‘Blogs have linked to you recently. [WARNING: Only works for ‘Blogs with unique names.]

  1. Go to Google Blog Search.
  2. Type the name of your ‘Blog into the search box, enclosing it in quotes if it contains more than one word in its title. For example, if your ‘Blog is called “To The Tooting Station”, type 
    "to the tooting station"

    (but without the backslashes that WordPress is insisting on inserting above against my will).

  3. After a space, type 
    -site:

    followed immediately (no spaces) by the root URL of your ‘Blog—that is, everything up to the first single slash in its Web address. For example, if your ‘Blog is at 

    http://tothetootingstation.typepad.com/blog/

    then type 

    http://tothetootingstation.typepad.com/

    The minus prefix to the word “site” is essential, because this excludes links into your ‘Blog that come from your own domain.

  4. Click the “Search Blogs” button.
  5. Follow the displayed links and respond bitchily to your critics in their ‘Blogs’ comment boxes.
  6. Repeat until you acquire a life.

Here is a link to the example search used above.

14Dec05 — 2

Three-Year-Old Unimpressed By Conspiracy Of Teachers

If you’re going to con a small child you’ve got to make some kind of effort. According to my mum, my sister has been phoning up my dad and telling her daughter (my niece) that she has Santa Claus on the line. Maisie picks up the phone and tells Santa (my dad) that she has been a good girl and that, for example, she didn’t even cry at swimming when mummy was combing her hair. (I‘d have cried. It’s big hair.) My dad doesn’t even bother to disguise his voice, with the result that, last time Maisie visited my mum, she told her baldly, and probably in complete puzzlement, “Granddad is pretending to be Santa Claus.” Apart from her slight problem with meaning of the verb “to pretend”, that girl’s not stupid.

14Dec05 — 1

Strange Day

I forgot to mention that my Thursday last week started with my being trapped in my car when its cheap-and-nasty central locking system went bonkers and shut me in (I had to pass the keys out through the window to a mechanic at local garage who got a passenger-side door open) and ended with my applauding in the middle of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique*, with the London Philharmonic sitting as far away from me as you are from your mains socket. In the audience two rows away from me (and Richard, who got top seats dirt cheap through his music connections) was one of the five people I shared a corpse with during my brief stumble through medical school.

*[For the future reference of anyone reading this not familiar with his 6th symphony (as I wasn’t), the third movement finishes with knobs-on-eleven and the next and last is more miserable than Morrissey supporting Radiohead. If you forget this then you can excuse yourself by pointing out that it’s now become almost traditional to applaud after the loud bit. Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO were having none of that and already had the next track cued up even as they’d just finished banging their collective heads through the previous one.]

14Dec05 — 1

I’m Condi. Fly Me.

Hi! Welcome to the CIA Airlines check-in desk. Could I ask you to itemize your hand luggage as you place it on the belt, sir?

Er, one holdall of shoes, running gear, and toiletries; one suitcase of casual clothes; one suit carrier containing three identical black suits and ties with matching Ray-Bans; one attaché case containing five million dollars in used and unmarked US dollars; one flight-case containing an unmanned killer drone; one cushioned rack containing guided missiles for the same; one encrypted, self-deleting hard drive detailing all black ops within the north Asian theatre since 1960; one non-metal handgun manufactured with captured alien materials technology; and two large, orange, chain-wreathed jumpsuits and blackout hoods, each containing a frightened Moroccan.

Well everything seems in order, sir. Would you prefer an aisle or window seat?

Window seat, please. I like to wave at the plane-spotters.

13Dec05 — 23

Just Warming Up

Since GrammarPuss has been at it lately, and I have just got off the train after a pleasantly alcoholic dinner and an unpleasant wade through the shoddy prose of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech* I’d like to share with you my language gripes of the moment.

You should only use “the latter” when you are referring to one of two preceding items. When there are three or more you use “the last”. It’s usually better not to use “the latter” at all, because it’s often ambiguous and it’s often used by people who think it makes them sound clever, rather than people who are clever enough not to have to try to impress anyone.

I realise criticising Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott for abusing English is like criticising Boy George for being camp, but today he referred to the emergency services currently dealing with the consequences of the explosion in Hemel Hempstead as “fully deserving of fulsome praise”. Apart from the parent phrase being a cliché, I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean “fulsome”:

fulsome adj sickeningly obsequious; nauseatingly affectionate

[Chambers Dictionary]

That’s all, people. Goodnight.

*[I’m going to give the old fraud such a fisking soon.]

12Dec05 — 8

Back To The 70s

On Friday Saturday evening, I went out for a noisy drink with Mr and Mrs Wardytron, their livejournal friend Jim(?) and a posse of goths. Thank you, Wardy, for inviting me. It was fun.

One of the few serious topics of conversation that came up was the new Conservative Party leader. It’s not been often in the past few years that the words “Conservative Party leader” and “serious” have appeared in the same sentence, except when “serious” has been followed by “difficulties”. Wardy suggested that now the leader of the Labour Party will be the one with the difficulties because the media have decided on a story and the story is that David Cameron is a plausible contender for Prime Minister; the media have gone further than that in fact: they are already writing the story of his triumph over Gordon Brown. I don’t believe that it’s going to work out like that in reality, but things are certainly going to be more interesting from now on.

What worried me slightly yesterday was that the Observer‘s Money columnist William Keegan, he of the unchanging Dean Friedman hair-and-tache and unreconstructed Callaghan-era economics, wrote a piece yesterday about how Gordon Brown had nothing to worry about. Since Keegan’s predictions about the British economy and his Old Labour criticisms of the Chancellor’s policies have been pretty consistently wrong throughout the reign of the Blair administration I am now officially scared.

I wonder what the collective noun is for a group of goths?

12Dec05 — 1

MTA Wanted—Emphasis On T and A

Media composer Richard subscribes to various lists that offers work for people in his business. As with much of the media world, those offering gigs are fully aware of the desperation of celebrity wannabes to get any kind of experience—so they pay accordingly: peanuts or less. To use the jargon, they take the piss.

Such classified services also display another common media world trait: an obsession with the superficial. Talent and knowledge are pretty much secondary to fashion and looks. Things are now at the point where plenty of advertisements say “models/actresses wanted” as though the two jobs were trivially interchangeable. I got a snigger from this ad Richard forwarded to me from Talent Circle (categorised of course as “low paid/paid”):

“Looking for stunning, bubbly and intelligent Female presenters for “Big Screen Poker Tv” a new digital Tv channel which is part of Opus Media PLC.
You will be part of a team responsible for studio interviews and attending International Poker events as well as lifestyle and show biz features.
An interest in Poker would be useful.”

11Dec05 — 8

Working Out

One month’s free personal training with my new gym membership and the need for structure in my life have turned me into something of an obsessive. The very helpful staff have shown me how to operate those strange torture machines I once mocked. I used to use the Genome Campus gym for one purpose: to pull an erg when I there wasn’t a boat for me to row in. The members there were mainly young scientists in a variety of shapes and sizes. Serious rowers—male and female—are the kind of shape I wish I could be all the time: lean, balanced, toned and, under normal clothing, completely unremarkable—admittedly “unremarkable” often means “unremarkable for someone who is also six feet five inches tall”.

As well as the “look”, boaties have the stamina and attitude of horses. A student in the institute I used to work in, Ella [front and centre in this photo], rowed for the Cambridge Women’s Lightweights. I saw her collect her Half Blue rowing against Oxford at Henley. Full Blues only go to the Amazons in the big boat. Despite having to live in an extreme dietary and physiological state for months, the Lightweight squad members are disparagingly referred to as “the Pretty Crew”. Ella’s friend Tamsin, also from the Campus, was stroke in the same boat and sat behind me in training on a couple of occasions to tell me in exactly what ways my technique was crap. (I get that from women.) Both of them are significantly shorter and lighter than me and both could comfortably outperform me on a rowing machine. Ella’s advice on improving my indoor rowing performance was simpler than Tamsin’s outdoors:

“You know that point in a session when you feel like your chest will burst and you’re going to die?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s when you start rowing harder.”

That’s why Ella has a Cambridge Blue and I don’t. That and my not having been a Cambridge student or been born with any natural talent for rowing.

Gym bunnies at a private club are a different matter. For many of them their “training” is driven not by the demands of competition but by aesthetics, of a sort. Some of the members are bright orange or leathery brown. At least one woman’s breasts have been overwhelmed by her pectorals. There is a 20-year-old man who has such freakishly pumped upper arms that he has to walk around like he’s carrying a stack of books on either side of his chest, but whose undertrained little-boy legs seem about to snap under the load of his cartoon shoulders.

Even before I joined this gym I had a heart monitor watch. Partly it’s the geek in me. Measuring an active subject’s heartrate in real time used to require laboratory equipment. Now anyone can do it. You wet a couple of contacts on an elasticated belt and strap it around your chest and it broadcasts every beat to a radio receiver on your wrist. It also broadcasts to any other receiver within range. What I’ve discovered using it in this shiny club is that most of the exercise machines there are also tuning in. Never mind CCTV cameras invading your privacy, imagine walking towards a row of occupied pedalling/running/skiing machines and seeing your vitals displayed on all of them. You’re in a room where everyone else present can glance down and see what’s happening inside your heart.

10Dec05 — 7

Non-Crazed England Football Editorial Shocker

After yesterday’s World Cup draw, some boring sense about England’s prospects from football365:

It is worth stating something that is blindingly obvious and yet often overlooked in the hysteria surrounding the national team: England’s peaks may be depressingly even, but the troughs have been negligible for many years now.

Since Sven-Goran Eriksson took over, the team have been consistently half-decent, in competitive matches, the world rankings and especially in World Cup terms, when compared with other countries. Handily enough, they also did all right in the previous World Cup, saving the debacle for Euro 2000, when at least they qualified.

England entered the world top eight, according to the FIFA rankings, in July 2002. Yes, they had just lost in the quarter-finals of the last World Cup, but that means only four teams did better than them. Think about it.

Eight teams did better than England’s last-16 exit at France 98. But of those, Argentina, France, Croatia failed to get out of their group in 2002 and Holland did not even qualify. Italy and Denmark (quarter-finals then last 16) have the same results as England, but the wrong way round with the higher achievement first, and Denmark have not qualified for this World Cup.

Only Brazil and Germany have bettered England in both the last two World Cups. No, honestly.

Aston Villa, though, are still rubbish.

09Dec05 — 4

Hard Cell

Saddam Hussein

Hi. I’m Saddam Hussein. You might remember me from my worldwide hits Massacre At Halabja, Gulf War I, and Gulf War II.

I’m here to tell you about custard, Bird’s™ Custard—The Choice of Despots™.

[Raises pack to camera stiffly. Walks along featureless metal corridor towards prison kitchen, but slowly because his ankles are chained together.]

[Looking sideways at camera:] You know, a lot of people say to me: “Sit down, Mr Hussein! Respect the authority of this court!”

And I say to them, “Where is my Bird’s™ Custard?”

When you’re dealing with a packed schedule like mine—squinting at the Koran, shouting incoherently, complaining about the room service, being accused of crimes against humanity by terrified old peasant women—you really feel the need at the end of a day to kick back with a pie and maybe pick up the phone and shoot the breeze with an old friend.

Jacques Chirac

It’s at times like that, that a hip and groovy jailbird like me yearns for the authentic home-cooked taste of Bird’s™ Custard.

[Close-up of stage custard being poured over a slice of stage apple pie. A metal file protrudes from the crust.]

VOICEOVER: “Thicker than George W Bush, richer than Yassir Arafat, yellower than a cowed tyrant—Bird’s™ Custard is truly the rightful ruler of dessert toppings.”

[A lookalike scoops up a mouthful with a spoon and swallows it lip-smackingly.]

Mmm! Defeat never tasted so good!

[Final pack shot next to close-up of Hussein’s face.]

Bird’s™ Custard: right now, I’d kill for some.

08Dec05 — 0

Channel 4: Nathan Barley Does Foreign Policy

For anyone else who has a Godwinian objection to my recent Channel 4 post, Never Trust A Hippy presents further relevant data:

The trailer prior to tonight’s (UK) Channel 4 Dispatches programme ‘America’s Secret Shame’ (part of a series of programmes about the war in Iraq) featured the series’ money quote. It was spoken to camera by one of the more right-wing correspondants on the Westminster beat (can’t remember his name). He said: “Iraq is the worst foreign policy disaster since Munich.”

(update 23.11.05: It was Peter Oborne of The Spectator)

07Dec05 — 8

Proud To Be British

I’ve been meaning to tell this heart-warming true story of national unity online for almost two weeks now and just haven’t had a chance to: I keep being troubled by the strange and topical outbursts of The Voices In My Head.

I get on a Brighton bus at about eight, having had some delightful early-Friday-evening drink and conversation with Hot Wheels Helena and The Boy, who are in town visiting friends. As I board, I can hear there’s a kerfuffle going on at the back. Some Brighton & Hove double-deckers have sets of four face-to-face seats at the rear and the rowdiness seems to be coming from that area. I assume it’s just some pre-Friday-night-out drunken joshing and sit myself down about half way along the bus.

It’s soon clear to me that one guy seems to be the focus of the fuss. He is probably in his fifties, but looks older. He’s wearing camouflage and a hat and is slouched down in one seat of a foursome, muttering audibly. His muttering is non-stop. He streams insults and complaints at those around him, particularly against an olive-skinned Asian/Pacific late-teen/early-twentysomething iPod boy in the seat opposite him. People are telling Camouflage Geezer to shut up. He tells everyone loudly that he won’t. Both a late middle-aged white Englishman in a “Queens, New York” baseball cap and a big, friendly-looking twentysomething local white girl are telling him that he should get off the bus. The girl shouts up to the driver at the front, demanding that he kick the irritating man off.

Eventually the driver reaches a stop and can’t ignore the noise any longer. A couple of passengers nearer the front, afraid that the driver will interrupt his route to do something about the matter, tell the others at the back to ignore Camouflage Geezer. The passengers at the back complain that those at the front aren’t the ones having to put up with his abuse. The bus driver turns off the engine and leaves his cabin to investigate. I think this is the first point at which I hear the passengers at the back accuse Camo Geezer directly of racism. This sets him off.

“I AM NOT A RACIST! They are calling me a racist. I have never been a racist! I was in the Anti-Nazi League in the 70s! I AM NOT A RACIST!”

Passenger: “You are racist! Get him off the bus!”

The driver asks the man politely if he’ll leave the bus so that everyone else can continue with their journey.

“I am not getting off the bus! I AM NOT A RACIST! You can’t even get on the bus now without being accused of being a racist.”

The kid opposite him who has been the focus of his abuse finally snaps, pulls his other in-ear phone out, and stands up to shout at Camo Man.

“Just shut the fuck up!”

“I am not a racist!”

“SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”

“NOT A!…”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

“…RACIST!…”

“…I WILL NOT SHUT UP! YOU CAN’T ACCUSE ME OF BEING RACIST. I was in the Anti-Nazi League!”

The bus driver gives up. After calling back to base:

“Sorry, you’re all going to have to get on to the next bus. Your tickets will all be valid!”

Groans from the front.

“I AM NOT A RACIST!”

It’s clear that Camo Man is suffering from what Hind would diagnose as an “antisocial personality disorder”. That is, to use the official DSM-IV terminology, he is a complete c”I AM NOT A RACIST!”

Then Camo Man decides he has found a get-out. Pointing in the direction of iPod Boy he says to the others:

“I didn’t know he wasn’t black! I thought he was black, okay?”

Groans.

People start trickling off the bus. With the engine stopped and the driver not settling back behind the wheel, it’s clear to everyone it won’t be going anywhere. Surprisingly quickly, another bus appears and we all start streaming on. Camo Man stays in his original seat, where, after another brief run-in with iPod Boy, he remains, muttering to himself. As we are walking to the new bus I share some sympathetic words with iPod Boy and tell him that I was pleasantly surprised that the driver did the right thing. We all pile on board and it isn’t even overcrowded. Once we’re moving the traffic is pretty slow though.

After passing a couple more stops our bus is waved down by a police patrol car coming the other way. The cop in the driver’s seat leans out and, in a slightly bored voice, shouts up to our new driver:

“Are you the one with the nutter?!”

06Dec05 — 2

Acrostic Baffles

This story appeared on the BBC News Website yesterday:

“Pakistan’s government is to remove a poem from a school textbook after it emerged the first letters of each line spelt out “President George W Bush”.

“The anonymous poem, called The Leader, appeared in a recent English-language course book for 16 year-olds. “

The Pakistani authorities don’t know who wrote the poem, but I’d be tempted to put a bet on this man. He’s got form.

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