16Sep04 — 9

Underestimating My Audience

I’ve been far too easy on you lot. Yesterday, in his eponymous and epurating ‘Blog, Oliver Kamm wrote of Johann Hari’s (silly) attack on Opus Dei*:

“[His] term Catholofascism is not accurate. There was in the 1920s a group known as clerico fascisti in Rome and Northern Italy, which aimed at a synthesis between Catholicism and fascism. This movement stressed a renewal of both the spirit and the nation. What Opus Dei stands for is extreme clerical reaction. The difference is comparable to that between the Croat state of the Ustasha and the Catholic authoritarianism of Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria. One is totalitarian and expansionist state-terrorism; the other is bigoted and repressive reaction, but without the connotation of expansionism.”

Tune in tomorrow when I compare Clinton’s and Bush’s approaches to US foreign policy with the Smith-Waterman and FASTA sequence alignment algorithms respectively.

(*Though they do indeed deserve a good kicking—of which more another time, I hope.)

16Sep04 — 8

It’s The Terror, Stupid

[Please, Miss, I wrote this post a day or so ago and my software ate it.]

I’m sure Hak Mao will correct me if it’s not, but this BBC News article reads to me like a balanced account for outsiders of the importance of international security considerations in the election race in Australia. Shocker.

16Sep04 — 1

The Euph Of Today

What would we do without Guardian editorials? We wouldn’t appreciate that people who run onto the floor of the House of Commons and shout at MPs are “thugs” and people who shoot children in the back are “hostage takers“.

(It’s worth noting the comparison made between Otis Ferry’s posh prannies and the Luftwaffe in today’s leader too—no loss of perspective there, then.)

15Sep04 — 21

Enrich Your Vocabulary

Today my car share partner and I thought we had invented a new word. In fact, a quick Google shows a precedent. It appears in this match report. I misheard her saying “travesty”. I am, however, going to post the first formal definition:

“chavesty n hopelessly naff attempt at grandness, made by members or graduates of the post-Thatcher* British lower classes in an effort to impress their peers, characterized by the aping of the very worst qualities associated with the aristocratic, rich, and/or famous; from ‘chav‘ qv

‘Posh and Becks’ wedding was a complete chavesty.'”

With your help I hope this word will take over Britain by the end of the year. Let’s do it together, people.

*”A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” (1986)

15Sep04 — 4

Virgin International

Some friends of mine are off on holiday to Rome later. As usual when anyone I know is going to a place with vaguely religious connections, I have asked them to bring me back a glow-in-the-dark virgin, an icon I recall with both spiritual and aesthetic horror from night stays at my Grandma’s in Preston.

When I was in Israel after the start of the second intifada, I remember walking through a touristy part of Jerusalem and being spotted by desperate Arab-Israeli souvenir sellers standing in the doorways of their little shops. “Come and buy!” they shouted after me. “You English?! Manchester United!” they called. Even more memorably, as I disappeared round a corner, one pleaded, “Won’t you even let us rip you off?!” Only minutes later, one of his colleagues did so, flogging me a completely non-luminous plastic Madonna as the real thing—the display model worked of course. Foolishly, I ignored the warnings of my much savvier Israeli companions, who could smell a dodgy deal across the width of the Dead Sea.

It used to at least require me to make a pilgrimage from the eruv in North London where I lived with my Hungarian stew-cooking landlady to the Irish enclave of Kilburn to find stuff like that. Now Catholic kitsch is cool and you can buy fluorescent Fatimas in Paperchase. Where’s the fun in that?

14Sep04 — 3

Putting A Bit About

Today’s featured Wikipedia article is about Jesus’s foreskin, or rather his foreskins because quite a few people claim to have had it/them. When I worked in a hospital lab I discovered that discarded foreskins were an excellent source of a particular class of cell called a fibroblast. This is one of only a couple of slightly redeeming features of the sexual mutilation of male infants. Treated with appropriate dyes and viewed under a microscope, fibroblasts are beautiful to look at. When I begin my new, post-science career as a guru I will take care to impress the magical powers of my prepuce upon the followers of my cult.

14Sep04 — 0

Everything’s Better In Widescreen

When I went a-hunting for that image of the BBC testcard this morning, I sort of suspected that the Web would be full of Aspies collecting TV transmission-testing arcana. Interested in the soundtrack? Try “The Girl—The Doll—The Music“. Want to see the card’s evolution? Check out the Carol Hersee photo album. Carol was the star of the card and the daughter of its designer George Hersee. She was playing noughts and crosses, but with whom? And why so badly? For thirty-odd years I have wondered—intermittently. Not having owned or had regular access to a television since the appearance of widescreen broadcasting I hadn’t seen the last, most recently designed of those testcards. Thanks to modern digital technology the original image can now be enjoyed in a letterbox-proportioned, director’s cut form. And at last I know the truth. The clown had a piece of chalk! The clown had a piece of chalk! The girl was playing noughts-and-crosses with the clown! Finally I can release my car boot sale-bought recording of Orson Welles’ commentary on Citizen Kane.

14Sep04 — 0

Subbnormal Service Will Be Resumed

A massive BT (British Telecom) outage in Birmingham isolated my Web hosts from about 12:00 hrs BST yesterday to 03:30 BST today. I’m inferring this from the notch in my visitors, rather than getting any useful information from UK Shells’ cryptic apology email. I haven’t had access to my sites or email for that period. Until I’ve caught up with my inbox and devised some new content, British users can entertain themselves with this:

the famous BBC television testcard

Incidentally, if I ever disappear like that again and you want to mail me urgently then you can send messages to exactly the address you would expect someone called “pootergeek” to choose in the domain of those nice Gmail people—you know, gmail.com. As long as NTL don’t fall over as well I might be able to read what you have to say.

12Sep04 — 1

Striking Another Blow For Stupidity

The BBC is too busy whittering on about Iraqis dancing around a burned-out US vehicle to have noticed that a suicide bomber has blown himself up trying to smash into the Abu Ghraib prison. You’ve got to give some credit for ironic humour to someone who fails to break into a prison to kill people who he presumably claims to be hoping to liberate, killing himself in the process. It’s a whole new level of comedy terrorism. Do you think there are comedy virgins lined up for him in the afterlife?

11Sep04 — 12

Science Fantasy Shakespeare

I suspect that I enjoyed and admired The Chronicles of Riddick so much primarily because I expected so little of it; I hope I don’t diminish anyone’s pleasure with this rave. Do not read about this film. See this on the big screen while you still can. It has been surprisingly unpopular and I only caught it because the Anonymous Economist nagged me to to go to one of the few remaining one-night showings in Cambridge with him/her because no one else would.

There is nearly nothing new in Riddick. It steals from half-a-dozen science fiction movies and a couple of the Bard’s plays. (He’s hardly in a position to complain, being a thief himself and, for that matter, dead.) Nearly everyone in the cast speaks in a portentous, gravelly voice. It is relentlessly macho. It is camp in the sense of “failed seriousness”, but also camp in the same way that a polished Broadway musical is camp.

It is a magnificent spectacle, dominated by terrible vistas of destruction. The suicidal cult of the Necromongers is a thousand-storey, dark pewter metaphor for Islamism—“Convert or die!”. The plot is at once obvious and unpredictable in its critique of regime change. There is symmetry and poetry to the story and the script. The fight sequences are inventive. A crackling playfulness animates the details.

I don’t want to give anything away, so I will offer one example of this last quality in the hope of persuading you that this work is more than popcorn and worth six quid of your hard-earned to see widescreen. Judi Dench plays an “Elemental”. She is simultaneously Greek chorus, probability distribution, Ann Clwyd, and talisman of British theatrical “qualidee”. She is a translucent, fluttering presence, winking in and out of substance, drifting on air currents. At one point, by some subtle means, she is imprisoned. As she sits and reflects in her captivity, she amuses herself by blowing across her fingertips idly. They flicker and smear like bright smoke. In a film of noisy, broad strokes, this little wonder is one of many mischievous, muted asides.

At the end, for the first time in years, I heard smatters of unironic applause in a cinema theatre.

11Sep04 — 3

No Such Thing As A Free Dinner

Last week I was invited to the swankiest academic dinner offered to me since I graduated from my first place of higher education. And, for the first time since then, it seemed to be free-of-charge. Naturally, I filled out the faxback form straight away and, er, faxed it back. Having achieved fuck-all since I left, it seemed pretty unlikely that they would be sending me two stiffies, one from the college I dropped out of and scraped back into and the other from the faculty that I turned my back on. But I had recently bumped into and chatted with the guest of honour in another context and figured that this encounter had had something to do with my getting on the guest list. I’d be more specific about the bash, but there were security warnings on the invites (which probably means that every Fellow of the Royal Society, the local police force, all staff at the relevant college and departments and all of al-Qaeda’s UK agents already have maps of the venues’ ventilation systems).

Then, yesterday evening, I also received the first written apology I have ever had from my alma mater since I graduated. Apparently they had omitted to tell me that the whole do was fifty quid a head and, although it would be nice if I could make a donation, they couldn’t really ask me for the money now, after such an unfortunate misunderstanding. That was an expensive mistake for them to have made, and some poor functionary had probably had an almighty bollocking for it. I reflected on the cost and embarrassment it was going to cause them and on how ungracious it would seem if I didn’t make some kind of financial gesture.

Then I thought about my miserable years there, the inept lecturing, the absence of any syllabus, the braying ninnies and faux-poor Lefty arsewipes surrounding me, the snobbery, the waste, the having to crack the ice in the toilet bowl in winter because I was housed on “comprehensive kids row” and thought: “Bugger that. Mine’s a large glass of your best port. Any chance of another bit of pheasant for my doggie bag?”

09Sep04 — 0

Killing Muslims Again

88 percent of the population of Indonesia is Muslim. If you can’t kill a Jew or a Christian or an atheist, you have to make do.

“Bloodied victims lay sprawled and screaming in front of the embassy, as dazed survivors desperately tried to locate colleagues and missing family members. A severed leg, human scalp and torso were strewn on the street among mangled cars and motorbikes.

‘I can’t find my family,’ said one woman, Suharti, who had eight relatives working at the embassy. ‘I am terrified. I don’t know where they are.’

Most of the nine dead were Indonesian”

09Sep04 — 19

“Read By People In Museums”

I have a pretty strict “no ‘Blogging during business hours” rule, but this is ‘Blogging about the business. A colleague has just sent me this story about an “intelligent design” paper being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. [You might need to register for free to read it.] I haven’t got the time to comment now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you lot have.

09Sep04 — 9

Things I Want To Do With PooterGeek

I have been yammering here and elsewhere about several things I would like to do with PooterGeek when I get some free time. I haven’t done any of them. This post will declare my intentions in public, and (I hope) remind me / embarrass me into action.

I’d like to interview some interesting academics. I already have four experimental subjects in mind, and they aren’t people I necessarily agree with on every question by any means—only one of them is an Oxbridge fellow. My hope is to visit them in their working environment, take photographs, and quiz them in a completely non-John Humphrys way. I want to nail exactly what they believe, rather than argue with them. In fact, I’ll be asking them to review their interviews after I’ve transcribed them to make sure they have a chance to explain their work and conclusions as clearly and accurately as possible to readers—and they will choose which pictures I publish too.

I want to write a layperson’s review of stem cell research, summarise some of the arguments for and against human cloning, and then state my own case on the subject—before opening up the comments for general debate.

I want to import many unconverted old posts from previous versions of PooterGeek. Apparently people now can’t access past content they would like to read and it’s disappearing from the Google cache.

Any views on these plans or suggestions for other things you’d like to see here are, as always, welcome.

08Sep04 — 3

You Won’t Believe Its A Skoda

My newsagent is so “Cambridge” it’s funny. The top shelf carries American Scientist, “The Magazine of Sigma XI, The Scientific Research Society”—a sort of Scientific American for people who still know how to use a slide-rule; Foreign Affairs, not part of the Richard Desmond empire; and, of course, The Economist, which this week, for once, looks in place up there. It has some tastefully rendered stockinged and high-heeled female legs on the cover because it has been reporting on the sex industry, in its usual impressively rational way.

On the other side of the legs of the lady of the night is an inside cover ad for Singapore Airlines dominated by photos of two Asian babes and the slogan “Singapore Girl, you’re a great way to fly”. Perhaps this is an ironic “70s revival” kind of marketing thing, or maybe it’s just a nose-hair-pullingly ill-considered piece of adland fuckwittage. I leave it to the secretary of the female CEO planning her boss’s post-MBA-graduation long-haul flight to the Sydney office to decide.

Anyway, one of the many things that made me snigger about The Economist‘s extensive coverage of the oldest profession was the revelation that British working girls are being competed out of the local market by overseas newcomers, especially from Eastern Europe. Non-Brit readers (and SquanderTwo who hates shopping in IKEA) will not be surprised to read that the immigrants offer better standards of service: “All the agencies will tell you that English girls are unreliable workers”. When it comes to dealing with customers, we can’t even lie on our backs properly.

08Sep04 — 0

Fit To Print

On my doorstep this week, I picked up a pile of Labour leaflets that I will be delivering around my patch [thanks, Allan!] and I also picked up a copy of the Liberal Democrat’s “local” “newspaper”, Cambridge Herald. [I make no apology for the ‘Blogtastic scare quotes.] This publication’s factual news reports by members of the party—with headlines like “Tony Blair should say ‘sorry’ for misleading the British people”—are broken up by an opinion column called “Herald Comment” telling us that “Mr Blair has been unnecessarily belligerent” and “it is all too likely that terrorists will seek to take revenge on Britain, as they did in Madrid this year”. The Herald has four A3 pages. Three of these pages carry photographs of Tony Blair with George Bush. Three show pictures of Charles Kennedy not with George Bush. I think the Lib Dems are trying to tell us something, but I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps Michael knows. Can you help?

(While we’re on the subject of local politics, I’d like to thank the Tories for this handy Web tool. People in Cambridge have been wondering where the local Conservatives are for quite some time. I know about 400 of them are in Market ward [scroll down to see that I didn’t quite come last of all].)

08Sep04 — 0

An Alanis Moment

My friends will, I think, smile wryly at the news that PooterGeek is the sixth hit on Google for “beneficial effects of marriage“.

[I could explain the “Alanis” reference here, but why bother shooting a fish in a bucket when plenty of people have bagged it already, including this guy? He’s wrong about her singing technique, though. Much as she annoys me, she’s got some pipes on her. And here’s all the irony you could want.]

08Sep04 — 3

Norman No-Mates

I sent an email to a “friend” yesterday:

“Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004
From: Damian Counsell
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803
To: xxxx@xxxx.net
Subject: p.s.

I have more Gmail invites than I know what to do with, so am welcome to
suggestions.

x“

It got what it deserved:

“Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004
From: “XXXX, XXXX”
To: “‘Damian Counsell'”
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510
Subject: RE: p.s.

Make more friends?”

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