29Nov04 — 16

Kids, Eh?

From Friday’s Telegraph:

“The head teacher of a girls’ secondary school has suspended 40 pupils after what she described as an ‘absolutely frightening’ case of bullying.

“Pamela Orchard took the action after viewing CCTV footage of the incident of ‘mass intimidation’ in which the large group of girls formed a circle around one 15-year-old pupil and threatened and verbally abused her.

“‘In 36 years of teaching I have never seen anything like this,’ said Mrs Orchard, of the 900-pupil Glenmore School, Bournemouth, Dorset.”

Well, you haven’t been looking very hard, love.

Just as Eton has its Wall Game, the unofficial school sport at my illustrious alma mater, Wilnecote High, was “Murder Ball”. The rules were simple. Every male on the concrete school yard chased after the eponymous ball (usually some squishy lump that had previously been a dog’s toy). From the moment you caught the ball you were considered to be “fair game”. Once you had the ball, you then had to hang on to it for as long as possible while everyone else was free to kick you. The longer you could cling to it, the “harder” you were. Since most of the boys were spineless fucks, when someone who was generally acknowledged to be “well hard” was in possession, no-one was too heavy with the blows. There might have been consequences.

I would stay uninvolved, away from the scrum, wearing my hooded “Parka” coat, hating the cold, yearning for some girl, worrying about The Bomb or my homework. One day, one of the little thugs decided to involve me more directly, by shoving the ball down into the hood of my coat to render me a legal target. This soon became a standard variant of the canonical form, like Australian Rules to Association Football: stuff the thing into Damian’s coat; kick the shit out of him.

Eventually one teacher (Mr Scoggins, Geography) decided not to turn a blind eye to this recreation, piled in, peeled me off the playground surface, and pulled the usual suspects in for a bollocking. It stopped them doing it to me for a few weeks. During the attacks, my mind would shift from maths or nuclear holocaust to speculation about why the flock felt it necessary to construct this abstract excuse around their collective desire to destroy me. Why invent a stupid game and pervert it? Why not just march onto the playground and jump on me en masse? Probably something to do with their spinelessness. Yesterday evening I smiled as a harmless looking middle-aged woman stood her ground in the face of an advancing hoodie-wearing, knuckle-dragging teenager, forcing him to step down off the pavement. She told her husband within the kid’s hearing, “I don’t see why I should always have to make way for them.” It probably helped that hubby was about six-three and looked like he could once have played for the All Blacks.

Every time some poor little bastard in this country is stabbed or beaten to death by his “schoolmates”, every time some child is found hanging from a rope in his bedroom or chokes on her own vomit after administering an overdose to herself the media go into “soul searching” mode and wonder how it could have happened here. It’s as though they have no memory of their schooldays, no insight into the lizardoid brains of their own spawn, are completely blind to the casualty cruelty all around them.

Yeah, children are cute and lovable aren’t they? Bull. Male or female, they are born instinctively selfish, intolerant, vicious shits. After a few years they learn cowardice and conformity too. Many, if not most, British schools (fee-paying, or not) are host to chronic, petty violence. Amongst the inmates, both inside and outside the gates, might is always right—just as it is in prisons or barracks. If you are a parent or a teacher with the necessary time and patience you can love, educate, and discipline children out of their inherent evil, but it’s much easier the majority of the time to pretend that it isn’t there or suppress temporarily its worst manifestations when you can’t.

I am mostly a happy adult. This is partly because, many mornings, I wake up and remember that I don’t have to go to school and spend the day being addressed as a “black bastard” by my peers (and on one occasion referred to as “that coon” by one of my teachers), that chavs are sufficiently physically intimidated by me these days that they back off before trying their chances, that I don’t have to depend on bored, indifferent, weak-willed “authority” figures for my personal safety.

Today I have exactly no friends from any of the schools I attended. On the whole, I like it that way. They remind me of a time I’d rather forget. Why do so many other people find it so difficult to remember?

28Nov04 — 4

Not Much Like The Future Of “Dance”

When my friend Leasey took me out clubbing in Cambridge with her friends recently, they made a point of avoiding “Ballare”. I now know why.

Like many other passengers on the sinking ship that was the Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre, a lovely Swedish girl is leaving it next week. I am with her, her husband, and a posse of other nice young Campus types at Ballare. At the start of the evening it’s just me and another old timer from the institute. He is fluent in Spanish so I ask him what “ballare” means. He says it’s a bit like the future tense of “to dance”, but not much. That has one “l” for a start. Eventually the others arrive.

This gang is in the middle of the packed dancefloor. I’ve joined in because the DJ has just begun to play some decent hip hop and R’n’B. I am finally getting to swing my pants to something with a groove rather than a relentless four-to-the-floor thud. Sadly this music is being played by the David Brent of DJing. He is technically incompetent. He is devoid of charisma. He is completely unaware of both of these things. He interrupts literally every twenty seconds to coin such timeless epigrams as “Everybody on the floor get shitfaced!” (as if they need encouragement), but he does not understand the meaning of the word “fader”, simply cutting the music dead to deafen us with his inanities. (The music itself is already shockingly loud and distorted. Even through my fancy earplugs I can hear bass coils close to burnout as they are overdriven by a straining amplifier.)

I am on the point of walking across to his console to tell him to shut up when a woman I have never even seen before sinks the fingertips of each hand into my buttocks. This seems to have been the result of a dare because, when I turn round, she and her mates are laughing heartily. Just before I turn back to the HGMP gang, I notice that the thin, short, male half of a newly-formed couple next to me has his wrist wedged under the broad belt of the fat, short, female half. The belt is the only thing marking out her waist. His hand is busy. He could be masturbating her; he could be looking for his car keys; he could be performing a circumcision. She has consumed so much alcohol already that the anaesthetic effect must be almost complete.

The mindless thudding recommences and I retreat to shake my head in disbelief at so many people getting so drunk at four quid for a small a bottle of beer. My shoes stick to the broken glass, in turn stuck to the carpet. The track playing is the sort of thing that a fortysomething Dane called Gunther who thinks “funk” is just the German for “radio” has written in his studio in Aarhus and released under a name like “Mikey Zee”. A man wets my ear with his mouth as he groans, “My leg’s fucked.” From my expression of complete mystification he concludes that I haven’t heard him. “My leg’s fucked from rugby,” he says, holding up his overpriced lager and grinning like a loon. It is not a chat-up line. He is obviously straight and I am not wearing my gay trousers.

I make a vain effort to say goodbye to the party girl. She and her husband seem to have left.

I go home alone to update my ‘Blog.

“Ballare” is Flemish for “Purgatory”.

25Nov04 — 2

Still No Cure For Stupidity

As the International Herald Tribune reports, modern medical science has finally succeeded in curing an unvaccinated rabies victim of the disease—albeit using a pretty extreme approach:

“[D]octors at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin put the critically ill teenager into a drug-induced coma and gave her anti-viral drugs, although it is not clear which if any of the four medicines she received contributed to her recovery”

It’s worth reading to the very end of the article for this:

“John Giese, the girl’s father, was grateful to the doctors and their novel treatment, but said that prayer had made the crucial difference.
“The day after we found out, I called on everyone we knew for prayer,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this week. “We believe a lot of that snowballed and it really made a difference.””

For some reason a vision of silver-suited aliens descending on a midwestern American homestead fills my mind, or maybe it’s a gigantic, black, slablike intensive care unit appearing near to a cave shared by a group of squatting apes somewhere in the African savannah.

22Nov04 — 2

A Reader Writes

Following on from my review of Bridget Jones 2 a new correspondent—not our friend from Switzerland—has just emailed me the following message, entitled “Sincere apology”:

“Damian

I’m sorry.

I should never have doubted you.

I thought you just a tirading loon, venting an unfulfilled spleen.

But you were right.

BG2 is truly awful.

Can you forgive me?

C”

You were right first time, C: I am, in fact, a tirading loon, but you are hereby forgiven. And, as I discovered the hard way, it’s “BJ2”—or perhaps you’re being ironic; it gets confusing around here at times.

22Nov04 — 2

Just So You Know

I’m not ill, dead or cut off from the Internet, people; I’m just ‘blogged out. Yesterday afternoon I found myself writing a piece so monumentally grumpy that I couldn’t bear to publish it. I might put something milder up tomorrow evening, but I think PooterGeek will be taking a few days off after that. You’re still welcome to send stuff in for me to post, but I think it’s time for me to take a chill pill, as the Young People say. There’s too much stupidity out there and I only have a limited amount of time to devote to pointing at it and laughing.

20Nov04 — 0

Our Man In Washington

It’s late. I’m knackered. If I write at length now I will probably annoy someone with my abuse of English. I’ll just say that I’ve come back from seeing the remake of The Manchurian Candidate with a couple of (Left-leaning Cambridge don) friends. We all agreed that it was as if a bonkers anti-globalisation conspiracy theory Website had gone widescreen. Disappointingly, there were no flying saucers. It was still entertaining and disturbing, especially Meryl Streep’s performance—which was even scarier than all of the invasive medical procedures we got to see in close up. Denzel Washington is admirably understated. The other players are well cast. And Wyclef Jean’s cover of Fortunate Son rocks like a workshop full of children’s wooden horses in an earthquake.

I wish I could remember enough about the original to make a sensible comparison, but I saw that one late at night on TV and drifted in and out of consciousness while it was showing. If you know the film you might have some idea how trippy an experience that was.

[The title of this post is also a reference to our Jon. I’ll reply to your interesting email this weekend when I have time to give it the thought it deserves.]

18Nov04 — 4

Safety In Flight

Good morning, chattels and infidels. On behalf of all of the team, welcome aboard this wide-bodied handcart from London Heathrow to Hell. Your flight has been the subject of a hostile, but successful, takeover bid by Intellectual Jihad. By co-operating with us in every way your inevitable demise could be postponed for anything up to an hour. In the meantime I’d like to take this opportunity to familiarise you all with the many facilities this soon-to-be-un-wingéd chariot of death has to offer and request that you pay close attention as we describe the procedures you should follow between now and your incineration.

In the rack in front of you, you will find censored copies of today’s Independent newspaper and Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Integrity? which you can, if you wish, choose to read instead of listening to me. You are all going to die anyway. I realise that you were hoping that your journey would be somewhat less eventful, but you can take comfort that your deaths will go some way toward undermining the global hegemony of the last superpower.

Under your seat you will find explosive jackets. Please ensure that the suicide belt is fitted to any children before attaching your own. Belts should be worn whenever the “Zionist Oppressor” light is illuminated. Do not detonate the explosives until you are within the vicinity of civilians. Smoking is prohibited at all times up until your becoming an actual cinder—I mean, your crossing the threshold of Paradise.

Along the length of the cabin you will find various exits. On the Left these are labelled “Appeasement” and on the Right “Isolationism”. You are welcome to use one of these to leave the plane at any time between now and our collision with a symbol of godless Amerikkkan capitalism—may the homeland of the Great Satan be ground as a cockroach under the sandal of the Prophet.

In the event of your plight becoming the subject of media attention, oxygen-of-publicity masks will descend automatically from the panels above your head. You can use these to communicate your distress to your relatives and to BBC News 24. Please take care to ensure that you blame your suffering on the intransigence of the so-called leaders of the so-called coalition of the so-called willing. Failure to do so will result in the release of greenhouse gases into your lungs.

One of my colleagues will now demonstrate the brace position, which you should adopt in the event of your beheading…

17Nov04 — 1

Racist Plonker or Why I Want England To Win Tonight

FOX Sports has a story about racist chanting by the Spanish crowd during the England-Spain Under-21s friendly yesterday. This relevant snippet is appended:

“The 66-year-old Spain coach admits he made the comment about Henry. He says it was not meant as a racist remark but was to motivate Jose Antonio Reyes, Henry’s Arsenal colleague, who is white.

“When asked by English reporters about the remark on Tuesday, Aragones hit back by saying that the English were guilty of racism centuries ago.

“I have a lot of black friends who have explained to me that the English were after them in the colonies,” he said.

UPDATE: The Beeb reports on a sorry England performance and the sorrier behaviour of the Spanish fans, which was clearly audible during the commentary on Radio Bloke.

16Nov04 — 4

Running On Empty

PooterGeek has long had a jokey button labelled “nice arse” over on the right hand side of its front page. It links to a picture of me running in an annual Cambridge charity relay race called “Chariots of Fire” last year. One of the other members of our particular Genome Campus team was a guy called Tony who works at the same institute as me; three years younger and much more serious about physical activity than I am, cycling and running like a nutter—the sort of guy who shaves his legs so the hairs don’t cause problems when he falls off his ultralightweight bike on his way in to work from another county. He was meant to be running in Chariots of Fire again this year, but he ballsed up by submitting the entry form (that I had completed for him) too late for the entry deadline.

Last Thursday Tony came back home, after running, and complained to his wife [first on the left] of chest pains. She said he looked grey. At 04:30 on Friday morning he went into theatre at Papworth Hospital. It turned out that he had a congenital defect that was causing one of the valves of his heart to leak. Ten hours of open heart surgery later they wheeled him out on a respirator with a new artificial valve in his chest, alive.

He probably made some heart surgeon’s weekend: an acute emergency in a young and superfit patient—no tiresome pillows of fat to cut through, much less of a risk of losing the poor bastard under anaesthetic, and an interesting little case to write up—someone said something about Tony being the only person of his age in the hospital to have been fitted with a valve like the one they have given him. His running around like a nutter probably extended his life by revealing the condition now; better this shock than Tony’s keeling over and dying at fifty as he mowed the lawn.

He should be able to lead a normal life from now on. I sent him a note today challenging him to a quick race over 2K when he gets out of hospital. He will have to have an annual CAT scan, but, apart from that, the only conspicuous long-term traces of the trauma will be a butch looking scar and the soft ticking noise his chest will continue to emit at all times.

15Nov04 — 0

Mellower Online?

Someone who knows me from the real world emailed yesterday. She’s just acquired broadband access and stumbled upon PooterGeek while surfing around. She wrote nice things about it and then compared my online presence to my actual presence, unironically demanding to know what had happened to “the ranting”. Tell me, people, am I losing my edge? Was I too easy on Bridget Jones II?

I’m fierce, I tell ya, fierce.

Grrr.

15Nov04 — 1

Aussies Oop North

It’s time for me to join the “writing about cricket while Fallujah burns” tendency—if I’m quick enough, that is. My dad never misses an opportunity to bang on about the glories of the Lancashire League, but I forgot to link him to the latest post about it over at Harry’s Place, a ‘Blog where other northern socialist types hang out online shouting at each other over their virtual pints of Boddingtons.

14Nov04 — 1

Starving Children

Because I wanted to experiment with the Amazon developer interface and because I want people I’ve never met before to buy me stuff, I have integrated my US Amazon wishlist into PooterGeek (over to the right and down a bit). A random entry from it should appear each time you reload this page. I also added a set of bodyfat-measuring bathroom scales to my UK wishlist today and found that “customers who shopped for this item” also shopped for Avril Lavigne’s latest album. I’m sure Britain’s marketing masterminds are reassured to know that the Bridget Jonesing starts young.

13Nov04 — 6

Now A Major Motion Picture

A Jerry Bruckheimer Production

45 MINUTES

starring

Aaron Eckhart as George W Bush

and

Don Cheadle as Tony Blair
[“I’m telling you, Steve, the sidekick has gotta to be black.”]

[Urban skyline. Dusk.]

TOUGH STREETS. NEED TOUGH COPS.

DETECTIVE GEORGE “DUBYA” BUSH—HE’S WRESTLED WITH DRINK. HE’S WRESTLED WITH DRUGS. HE’S WRESTLED WITH THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. THEY RAN HIS FATHER OFF THE JOB. THEY DOUBTED HIM, MOCKED HIM, MISUNDERESTIMATED HIM. NOW HE’S BACK FROM ELECTORAL COLLEGE WITH A MANDATE TO KILL.

[Police headquarters.]

First Cop [jeering]: Hey, Dubya! Your new partner’s just arrived! And just in time for “tea”.

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR ANTHONY “BULLDOG” BLAIR—SEVEN YEARS ON THE MEAN STREETS OF LONDON TOWN. HE’S TAKEN EVERYTHING THEY’VE THROWN AT HIM AND KEPT ON COMING BACK FOR MORE.

Blair [to Bush]: Awright guv’nor! Anthony Blair’s the name. Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’ve heard awl abaht you, mate.

LIEUTENANT KOFI “ATTA BOY” ANNAN—THERE’S ONLY ONE OLD-TIMER WITH THE CHOPS TO KEEP THIS CRAZY TEAM IN LINE.

[The Lieutenant’s office]

Bush [to the Lieutenant]: You’ve given me a goddam Limey for a partner?!

Annan: Damn straight, buddy. When you gonna realise that it ain’t just you against the World out there?

Blair [walking into Kofi’s office and ruffling Bush’s hair]: Leave it aht! From wot I’ve ‘eard you need all the friends you can get, cowboy.

OSAMA AL-ZARQAWI HUSSEIN—ON THE SURFACE A RESPECTABLE ARAB ENTREPRENEUR WITH INTERESTS IN CONSTRUCTION, OIL, AND IMPORT-EXPORT, BUT BUSH IS CLOSING IN ON THE CRIMINAL TRUTH ABOUT HIS FATHER’S FORMER BUSINESS PARTNER.

[The Precinct at night]

Blair: Look, mi ol’ China, you jolly well know we ain’t got enough to send the department after ‘ussein.

Bush: I’ve got all I need, Tony, my friend. [close-up of Bush loading his Magnum. Zoom in on his face as he lifts the weapon to the side of his set jaw] He tried to kill my daddy.

[A busy street. Day. Bush and Blair run in slow motion towards the camera, away from the front of a restaurant. The whole building explodes in flames sending them both tumbling]

[Later. The Lieutenant’s office. Bush and Blair sit in front of his desk in torn and charred clothes.]

Annan: You blew up a goddam restaurant because you thought Hussein was closing a goddam deal there?! I’ll tell you what you can do with your goddam “thinking”. As of today the only goddam blowing up you’ll be doing will be blowing up your sunbeds! I’m taking taking those badges and putting you both on indefinite goddam leave!

[Night-time. An empty office. Bush and Blair pore over a computer print-out by torchlight.]

Blair: Geezer! Are you tellin’ me that Hussein’s been paying off members of the force, like?

Bush: It’s worse than that Tony; [he points at a page] It looks like the Lieutenant’s son is on the take too.

[A back-room of the police social club. A secret meeting]

Blair: Look, chaps. Havel’s on board, so’s Aznar…

Bush: …and Kwasnie-, Kieswa-… …the Polack.

[Blair buries his face in his hands]

Blair: Y’know, there’s a lot of fellas who are ready and willing to raid Hussein’s arms dump. Everyone knows ‘e’s got the stuff. We can do it alone if we have to, but we want your help.

FORCED TO WORK OUTSIDE THE LAW, CAN BUSH AND BLAIR BRING DOWN THE BAD GUYS BEFORE THE CITY ELECTIONS?

TWO MEN. ONE HELL OF A RIDE. FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. IN MIDDLE EASTERN THEATRES FOR A LONG TIME TO COME.

13Nov04 — 5

Car Crash Radio

[Before I start, I’m just going to say something about my editorial policy. A tiresome Leftie elsewhere in the ‘Blogosphere was taking Norm to task the other day for writing about cricket while Fallujah burned or something like that. This has been a week of Important Events in the World, but a week of froth on this ‘Blog. That’s because I feel like writing about froth and not about the serious news. PooterGeek is my world. If you don’t like it, read Instapundit. Now for more froth.]

So, earlier this week, I’m listening to the bathroom radio before I retire when on comes Graham Torrington’s Late Night Love. This is a allergenic mixture of phone-in angst and schmaltzy tunes. Usually I find myself telling the first miserable, attention-seeking caller to pull himself or herself together (and often Graham Torrington does), but even I felt some sympathy for “S”.

S told Mr Torrington about how her long-term boyfriend had confessed to her that he had had oral sex with his best (male) friend. Big deal: there’s a lot of that sort of thing going on between supposedly straight males. Then she burst into tears as she related how, a little later, he had admitted that the oral sex had been going on for fourteen years. This has got to be grim: she thinks he’s been honest, tries to understand; he turns out to be deceitful, unfaithful, and deluded. She was so upset that, after offering her some sympathetic words, Tozza had to tell her to phone back later and resorted to putting a record on (while his producer was probably frantically lining up another sufferer).

Then the rubberneckers arrived. Did the first ring in to share her own similar experience? Not exactly, no. After a quick survey of the wreckage, she wanted to say that her boyfriend had admitted to her that he had had “a homosexual experience” once after a night clubbing. Now she believed that the reason he wouldn’t “commit” to her after four years was that deep down he was probably gay. Even blokes who work on building sites only use the “she doesn’t want me—she must be a lesbian” line as a joke these days.

13Nov04 — 0

Plugged In Again

Reader, I sent an email this morning, from my email account. If you have been corresponding with me via Gmail recently you can now revert to the counsell.com address. Not only that, but UKSolutions came back up again yesterday after disappearing some time in the morning. Being able to send email from your email account, eh? Being able to look at the Web pages on your Website, eh? What will those boffins come up with next in return for the great wedges of cash I stuff into their pockets every month?

11Nov04 — 1

Missed Opportunity

Despite being away from the lab, I missed my chance to go to “The Wellbeing Show 2004” at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Halls. According to Time Out, if I had attended I could have tried inversion therapy, had myself screened for allergies, or had my aura photographed. Perhaps next year.

11Nov04 — 6

Mixing By Committee

Thank you for the truly helpful and insightful comments you’ve emailed/posted about the rough mixes of my latest song. I have tried to take them all into consideration in making these:

Cliff’s sharp ears in particular generated a lot of work for me, but I’m glad because I learned plenty about Sonar 4, a deeply wonderful suite of music software, as a result.

I could definitely get into this online music thing that you youngsters so enjoy. Thanks again.

11Nov04 — 15

v. v. shit

Bridget Jones II is so bad on so many levels that it will be difficult for me to keep this post deservingly short. If you’re in a hurry, read my title.

[But first, in answer to Eric’s thoughtful enquiry, I have not been following anything like my usual routine lately. That, my being ill over the weekend, and my general Internet problems have made for meagre posting. I hope to get back into a rhythm next week.]

Now, back to what is almost certain to be the worst film of the year, because, unlike most other bad films, it cannot cite limited funding or talent or interest as excuses for its badness. I set out ready to like it. I was dragged to the first one and was hugely and pleasantly surprised that it turned a thin joke in The Independent (which I read regularly while I was actually working “in the media” in London) into a funny, almost-spiky mainstream comedy. This time I had been invited to a première and I happily put on black tie for what I thought would be a fun night out. It was a fun night out, but not because of the movie, which, I must remind you, I was already well-disposed towards. I have plenty of time for a good chick flick and I am so susceptible to cinematic sentimentality that I could be made to cry by a well-scripted advertisement for feminine hygiene products.

BJ2 isn’t just a bad chick flick. It is a bad flick. It is artistically bad. It is intellectually bad. It is technically bad. It is morally bad.

BJ2 is bad because it has an insultingly implausible script acted by people phoning in their performances from a runaway trolley in a disused tin mine in Cornwall on a broken mobile phone with a weak battery. BJ2 is bad because it is as moving as a plea for clemency from Saddam Hussein. It is bad because its soundtrack was cobbled together at high-level meetings between various large London music publishing companies wanting to “monetize” their back catalogues and the people representing permatanned pop singers with vocal chords made from expanded foam packing materials wanting to maximize their exposure. BJ2 is bad because it pretends to be quirky and modern even as it pushes an ideal of womanhood as damaging as foot binding.

Is there anything good about BJ2? There is.

Saints preserve us, one of them is Hugh Grant. Every time he appears on screen he manages to bag at least one of the ten good lines in the film. He is as unconvincing as the rest of the cast, but at least he is funny. He mugs so much I kept expecting him to turn to the audience and address us directly: “Yeah, of course it’s cack, but it’s too late now: you’ve paid. Hah!”

Another is Renée Zellweger who—heaven knows why—has been doing the interview rounds saying that she would only have allowed herself to do Bridget again if the screenplay had some substance. So why the fuck did she feed herself up, wobble around in unflattering clothes, and generally out-ugly late-period Brando for this? She is enthusiastic and her accent is excellent (if odd), but she is a wave function approximating to a person. Despite her efforts, just as I wanted every character in The Blair Witch Project to die horribly within about fifteen minutes of meeting them, I wanted BJ to suffer every indignity visited upon her. How are we supposed to believe that a woman I would dump for her utter childishness shortly after opening the wine menu is so appealing to so many other people in this story? [I’d prefer it if people didn’t address that one directly in the comments, thank you.]

Zellweger is, however, responsible for much of the third good thing: the physical comedy. I hate physical comedy because it is almost always stupid. But, like Diana Spencer in a posh nursery when the other staff are outside the building, the falling about is at least a little bit more sophisticated than much of what it going on around it. There is a nicely choreographed skiing sequence, and Hugh Grant and Colin Firth reprise their crap fighting to amusing effect. (Perhaps another good thing about this film is that, after his fifty-seven-varieties-of-tedious-brooding contribution to this, women will go off him completely and no longer wibble on about Firth clambering out of That Bloody Lake.)

Tell everyone you know not to see this. I know I will. I am proud to say that I opened my cheque book for charity this evening, rather than for the cynical bastards responsible for this crime against film-making, not that it will make much difference. After all the other screenings they’ll be shovelling it into the back of people carrier, just like they’re shovelling their poisonous sexist myths into the minds of millions of impressionable young women: dye your hair blonde, get a girly job, totter around spouting pop culture bollocks, drink, smoke and talk about “shagging” a lot, and generally don’t bother your pretty little head with anything too challenging; and perhaps a nice old Etonian (an emotionally constipated one, naturally) with a title and an impressive-sounding, right-on, well-paid job will rescue you from your insignificance by asking you to be his wife. It’s okay: it’s ironic.

Girls, just say no.

09Nov04 — 2

Annoying

I am having Internet connectivity problems. My Web access is flaky. I am getting mail slowly, but can’t send it. Sorry!

08Nov04 — 3

Farewell, Ivor; Hello, Kylie

Over the weekend, Judith told me that a feature-length adaptation of Brideshead Revisited is being planned. For this version, the Catholicism will be toned down. This is the sort of thing Evelyn Waugh might have written into a satire of Hollywood. [“Waugh’s a man? Is he some kind of faggot?!”] Maybe we can petition to get Mel Gibson on board and put the religion back in. In his version, at least two of the cast would be lashed to the Martyr’s Memorial in Oxford and we’d see their flesh being seared in close-up as a bonfire burns around them. John Hurt would stalk through the flames under five-hours’ worth of make-up, playing the Devil with a weary aristocratic drawl.

Via Socialism In An Age Of Waiting I belatedly note that Ivor Wood has died. (Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.) Amongst other wonderful works, he animated a children’s series called The Herbs which I watched with my mother as a child. Mum used to (and occasionally still does) call me “young-fellow-me-lion” after the catchphrase of a character in the show. Looking back, the whole idea of the programme was breathtakingly surreal, but made perfect sense to me at that age. This is, I suppose, applies to a lot of great children’s fiction. Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington (another childhood passion of mine), wrote the scripts, so he should take at least some of the blame for my damaged personality. Wood was also involved in the making of Postman Pat which has done much to plant the word “cat” firmly in my niece’s vocabulary.

The trippiest programme Wood contributed to was The Magic Roundabout, apparently a different show in French—not that I’ve ever seen that version. Guess what. There’s going to be a movie remake of The Magic Roundabout too. Tom Baker will play ZeeBadee. Bill Nighy will play Dylan. Jim Broadbent will play Brian. Sounds great, until you find out that Kylie bleeding Minogue will be Florence and Robbie bloody Williams will be Dougal.

As Michael might have been tempted to point out, both Brideshead and The Magic Roundabout are in the British Film Institute‘s “Top 100 Greatest British Television Programmes“.

07Nov04 — 5

Bleargh

I’ve been in bed for the past couple of days with a nasty little dose of food poisoning. On reflection, it was probably the Stilton, bacon, and red onion baguette that did for me. It tasted wonderful at the time. Because of my illness I’ve been listening to lots of radio.

On Friday, as the nausea started, I tuned in to “Whispering” Bob Harris on BBC Radio 2. His personal Website is currently dominated by Harris’s tribute to his mentor, John Peel. Peel gave Harris his break, but Harris matured into a greater DJ. As I hunched over the sink on Friday night he played Fountains of Wayne’s nifty new wave-style skit “Stacey’s Mom” from earlier this year, and I muttered to myself, “It could be The Cars”. Then I thought, “and even back then they were making a synthed-up pastiche of 50s rock’n’roll”. Sure enough, His Bobness followed it up with The Cars’ “Best Friend’s Girlfriend”. That song is 25 years old now. I feel like a gouty old duffer in a Bath chair. The two tracks were the first I heard in an evening of musically varied and technically solid programming.

On Saturday BBC Radio 4 broadcast the last part a superb adaptation of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir. The acting and the recording could not have been bettered, and that includes the probably inauthentic, but shrewd, use of regional accents. The music was slightly annoying, but the real problem for me, though, was the ending. Was it meant to be so perfunctory? Had the producers simply set the narrator to summarise the events of other volumes in Les Rougon-Macquart? If there’s a Zola scholar out there who heard it and knows I’d be grateful for some explanation.

05Nov04 — 0

Thanks To The Grassly-Khalifehs

I meant to say thank you to Nicholas and Hind for dinner yesterday. In fact it was my discovering that Adam, the latest addition to their family, looks exactly like Nicholas, but smaller and a bit more Arab, that made me post about the Karzai photo. Thanks for the “Death to the Zionist Infidels” shopping bag too.

Hind showed me the current edition of glossy Jordanian lifestyle magazine Living Well that reprints one of my photographs twice. The copy that has a credit says that someone simply called “Damien” took it. (Thanks, Amar.) “Guide2Jordan“, which is either a stale ‘Blog or “Jordan’s Premiere News Gathering Service”, said in 2003:

“A new breed of glossy society magazines showing the rich and famous partying, women in strapless dresses or featuring articles on beauty tips is causing quite a stir in Jordan. For some people in this traditionally conservative Muslim society, magazines with names such as Layalina (Arabic for Our Nights), Living Well, Yahala (Welcome) are a breath of fresh air.”

It’s nice to be doing my bit to piss off the sort of people who stab Dutchmen on bicycles.

05Nov04 — 3

The Anglo-Saxonsphere

A frequent correspondent points me to this story in which Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, takes exception to the Prime Minister of Iraq describing non-participants in the liberation of his country as “spectator” states. My correspondent suggests that, rather than apologize to Juncker, Allawi should have told the esteemed European leader to “go fuck himself”. I think there ought to be an online petition so that I and millions of others (quite a number living in Iraq) can join in in encouraging M. Juncker to go forth and multiply.

Elsewhere in Old Europe, the Greeks are throwing a hissy fit about the USA deciding to call Macedonia “Macedonia”. What are you going to do about it Greece, smash some plates? Perhaps a more practical response would be to prepare for the humanitarian crisis the renaming will inevitably cause.

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