19Aug04 — 18

You May Now Turn Over Your Papers

Advanced Level Broadsheet Columnism: Section 1

Choose any one question. You have 45 minutes to complete and file your answer for sub-editing.

  1. How arrogant exactly is George W. Bush? Support your answer with half-remembered things you heard at a dinner party earlier in the week, stereotypes of American people, and two of the following clichés:
    • “neo-conservative cabal”
    • “cowboy bully”
    • any phrase combing the words “Blair” and “poodle” or “lapdog”
    • “crushing of dissent”
    • “stole the election”
    • “disaffected Arab youth”
    • “fundamentalist Christian lobby”

    Extra marks will be awarded for quoting Bush Jnr.’s malapropisms and for making pseudo-Freudian references to Bush Snr.  Illustrate your essay with a cartoon depicting the President of the United States as a monkey.

  2. Men are shit.  Discuss.
  3. Why are degrees in English Literature and Ancient History, as studied by your daughters Olivia and Celeste, inherently superior to degrees in Media Studies and Surfing, studied by lower-middle class youngsters with poorer ‘A’-Levels and vowels? Make your case around one or more of the following:
    • Literary and historical studies have been around for a very long time, since the Golden Age of Universities when exams were hard, grants were free, and oiks couldn’t get in.
    • Olivia and Celeste are not oiks.
    • You have a third in English from Brasenose.
    • They’re Mickey Mouse degrees, aren’t they?
    • Oiks should be studying plumbing because the last time you had one round it cost you an arm and a leg. And they all drive BMWs now, don’t you know? It’s shocking—and at the same time as Celeste has had to work in Starbucks since she graduated!
  4. Think of a public figure who has recently been embarrassed by his or her sexual behaviour. Project onto him/her the character traits that led to your estrangement from your former spouse. On the basis of this imagined intimacy, give that public figure unsolicited advice. Ask your editor, “Will that do?”
  5. Extrapolate wildly from something that happened to you on the Tube this morning.
  6. Please write an essay entitled “Why I Can No Longer Vote Labour”.

    On second thoughts, please don’t. No one gives a toss about your insignificant apostasy. Really. Most people who are actually going to put pencil to paper in a polling booth have seen the “value” of their houses go up 20% in the last year alone. Quite a few of them have used their little lottery wins to buy nice new Audi TTs. Their kids have got eyebrow-raisingly good exam results. The overtime money is rolling in. Few of them can remember what an unemployed person looks like (and the hundreds of thousands claiming sickness benefit are at home in front of the telly or driving minicabs). Most people own mobile phones with more processing power than the whole of the World had throughout the 1950s. England are playing cricket like they still have an empire. A DVD player costs so little it’s not worth stealing. In fact, people can’t even remember what it’s like to be burgled or what inflation is. They can, however, remember the unpleasantness of Michael Howard. And him and the ginger bloke from Have I Got News For You? are spineless opportunists flailing around in a sea of public indifference. You think the electorate are shallow, materialistic and care more about paying their mortgages than they do about the deaths of British servicemen overseas. Well, they have as much contempt for your opinion as you have for them. Guess who’s got the power?

In all answers marks will be deducted for the use of peer-reviewed scientific literature, sound statistical approaches, and failing to build your arguments on well-characterized logical errors.

17Aug04 — 0

Overdue Plug

I should have got round to saying this sooner, but Mick Hartley’s ‘Blog has been even more excellent than usual lately. If you’d like to read some more serious stuff than usually appears around here have a browse.

17Aug04 — 0

Not That Tony

Someone called “Tony” has been posting on Stephen Pollard‘s ‘Blog lately. By his own admission, he is a Leftie, recently turned to the Right by the various mad outpourings of the Left since 9/11. His own opinions also scare me somewhat. I enjoyed this exchange:

“Tony”:

“It’s reckoned that a stupid proportion (90%?) of crime in this country is carried out by 100,000 habitual offenders. Well, if that’s true – collect ’em all up, and dump ’em on a nice island somewhere (we must have one somewhere in the world, bloody hell, let’s rent one) – no possibility of parole, no possibility of ‘reform’, nothing. Harsh? well, lets ask the victims what they think shall we?”

“Mark”:

“Tony – we tried that once before and got the result we deserved – Australia. I’d rather take my chances with them out on the streets.”

17Aug04 — 0

John’s On Again

In a time of dying ‘Blogs, it’s good to see that “Dear John“, the ‘Blog of a twentysomething assistant and self-proclaimed “newsletter bitch” to a Labour MP, has returned after a long absence. The proprietor claims he has only one reader—another MP’s lackey—but how could I resist a ‘Blog that has had Geek and Kamm at numbers two and one on its blogroll respectively?

16Aug04 — 1

Retro-Blogging

One day in the nineties, my friend Hind, woke up and left her student house to go for a walk in Oxford. She threw on a sloppy sweater, pushed her hair into something like a do, and strolled up the Cowley Road towards the city centre. Some French schoolkids walked past her. One saw her, pointed, and tugged at her friend’s sleeve:

“Regarde! Le Grunge!”

Hind is Palestinian. Kurt Cobain was gunned down by the man. I think you can join the dots.

16Aug04 — 0

Finally The Vietnam Analogy Comes Into Its Own

A couple of weeks ago Italy beat the USA Olympic basketball team 95–78 in an exhibition match. On Sunday the USA lost 92–73 to Puerto Rico. Click here for an image of seven-foot beige people trying to make sense of the scoreboard [free New York Times registration].

Harry, of Chase Me Ladies, claimed that he was being kept up all night by a Venezuelan election [must…resist…cheap…innuendo]. I, on the other hand, have been left in turmoil by the shocking twists and turns in the illegal Honduran nodule scandal that has gripped the world of ping-pong—to quote the player in question from the BBC Website:

“I’ve played with this racket for 10 years and then yesterday they say the pimples are wrong.”

15Aug04 — 4

Coming Out

Golan Cipel, the man at the centre of the sex scandal engulfing former New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey declared to the press today, “I am a straight Israeli.”

He continued, “Many people in the World today believe that there is something unnatural about my nationality; some even refuse to believe that citizens like me exist. They are disgusted by me and other members of my minority, even to the extent of refusing to compete with us in sporting events. I want to state today that I am proud of my national orientation and have nothing to be ashamed of in my recent actions.”

Having left U.S. public administration, Cipel plans to move to London to start a career in television as part of a team of his fellow countrymen and women on a new BBC show “Israeli Eye For The English Guy“. In it, five Israelis specialising in different lifestyle areas will teach a different repressed, over-polite English person each week how to argue politics with strangers in public without the aid of warm beer, loudly point out relatives’ character flaws at family gatherings, and complain effectively in shops in order to obtain a better standard of service.

15Aug04 — 0

Straight Outta Pangbourne

Listening to Vibe in the shower today, I was stunned when Aretha’s “Respect” failed to shame completely the current single that followed it. Cherie’s “Number 1” is sung so well, pumps along so brightly, and is produced so smartly that you’d never guess she was from, er, Berkshire. As is sadly so often the lot of the black diva, Cherie’s man gone done her wrong, but—unlike her paler peers of the Dido persuasion—she ain’t takin’ no more. She had me swinging my metaphorical pants behind the curtain like a coloured backing singer on a Rolling Stones tour. So, once I’d dried off, I went a-surfing for more information. Cherie’s Number 1 is number 10 on Blues and Soul‘s “Hip List“. If you are ‘banded up you can watch the video online here. Bless her, Cherie’s got flesh on her bones too.

When I tried to hunt that track down, I also stumbled upon this Cherie. Think of the terrible disappointment of people who buy tickets for the wrong US tour. The American Cherie is, in fact, a French Cherie, but her latest single samples the superb rhythm guitar part from Foreigner’s best ever single, “Urgent“. “I’m Ready” is performed by a ‘shopped up teenager with enviable hair; it is no doubt produced and engineered by some anonymous LA hitmeisters; the whole package is slickly promoted on the Interweb by the global music factory that is now Atlantic (albeit disguised as “Lava Records”); and, to cap it all, it rides on a looped groove excreted twenty years ago by corporate rock dinosaurs working in collaboration with Thomas Dolby. In short, is almost everything your average* NME music journalist detests. In short, it is almost everything pop should be.

[*Is “average” redundant here?]

14Aug04 — 1

Babies And Bathwater

Bit of a ruckus breaking out in the comments of my jokey “Staff Shortage” post about the cloning of human embryos. I think the two Davids are both right. Yes, I should be cautious about speculation and yes, as a scientist I ought to try to share my understanding of the technology with others so that at least one tiny segment of the public can debate the implications of such work in a more informed way. There are scientists who have reasonably successful careers without properly grasping their own little twigs of specialized knowledge, never mind other branches of their discipline. Modesty doesn’t forbid me from believing that I am not one of those. (I have a crap career, but I try my hardest to to get my own stuff right and review other people’s work rigorously.) I had some discussions yesterday with a colleague who, funnily enough, is just back from a gene therapy conference [she edits The Journal of Gene Medicine], and I had planned to post a crash course in the cell and molecular biology of stem cell science here and to tackle the broad question of what therapeutic cloning is and isn’t about this week. So give me a chance, guys. But first I have to go to one of those quaint ceremonies where they bless the future work of collaborators in unregulated experimentation in in vivo cell fusion.

13Aug04 — 1

Bourne Again

I met up with the Anonymous Economist for the first time in ages yesterday when we nipped out for a post-work cinema trip. We agreed that what we saw was excellent, but we disagreed about the title. I think “The Bourne Supremacy” is a terrible name for a novel or a film or even a video game.

Regardless of the spooks gossiping throughout about “oligarchs”, this is, in spirit, a Cold War movie—and all the better for that. It’s shot in a grainy, juddering, washed-out documentary style and set in all the locations you’d expect of that genre. One superb fight sequence takes place in a cramped, anonymously modernist bachelor pad and brings to mind the famous train compartment struggle in From Russia With Love, as two temporarily disarmed professional killers go at each other with whatever comes to hand. You recoil in your seat from the blows.

The realism of the presentation and the mostly sound acting are usually enough to distract you from the relatively small number of implausibilities in the plot and dialogue. For the bulk of the movie, the soundtrack pulls off the trick of being conspicuous and impressive without being distracting. If you want to watch a solid thriller that can’t disguise its nostalgia for “the old certainties”, check it out—but watch The Bourne Identity on video first.

12Aug04 — 15

Staff Shortage

Bizarrely, someone at the conference I was working at last week walked up to me and invited me to apply for a job here, despite my having told him to be quiet during a seminar that I later discovered he was co-chairing. He’s Australian; they have a different attitude to that kind of thing—and he asked quite a lot of attendees to apply for jobs with him during the course of that meeting.

It now turns out that The Centre For Life is so desperate for people that it has been given permission to start cloning them. The detail I love about this story is that Miodrag Stojkovic, one of the group leaders concerned, speaks with the sort of Mittel-European accent that most people would hear and associate with B-movie mad scientists. Wouldn’t it be fun if it was an elaborate hoax by a bunch of mischievous Geordies?

[Yes I am being flip about an extraordinary and potentially beneficial advance in science, but the truth is I’m lost for words. The alternative would be an Onion-style “Holy Crap! Man Walks On Moon!” piece and I haven’t got time for awe; I’ve got to go to work.]

12Aug04 — 0

Hopelessly Behind

People—especially Adam, Claire and Jon—have been sending me lots of fascinating material and I haven’t had the time to read, comment on, or link to it. I slipped behind on PooterGeek during my ‘Net-less weekend just gone and I haven’t caught up since.

Here‘s one from Adam on possibly the nerdiest gathering since the Albert Einstein School for the Gifted’s 1983 Dungeons and Dragons retreat. (He sent the link to me just before our volleyball team went down nobly and defiantly to the best on the Genome Campus yesterday. We were good, but not good enough. Respect to Elliot, Gabriel, Jo, Nicola and farewell to our net-smasher Angus—who, I’m sure you can guess from his name, is a six-foot-plus, musclebound black Nigerian.)

11Aug04 — 0

Leave Me Alone, You Fat Bastard

On Monday evening I took a brief and long-planned break at a busy time to have dinner with friends in a good local French restaurant, Bruno’s Brasserie. The food was excellent. The company was lovely. The only flaw in an almost perfect evening was the nightmare that followed. In it, Michael Moore was firing a crossbow at me while I ran around an icy lake trying not to be hit. He shot me in the biceps and shoulder several times, causing that unpleasant, dull ache that dreams substitute for actual pain. Perhaps my upper arm was wedged awkwardly between me and the bed.

(A few weeks back I saw an overweight man walking down the Mill Road in Cambridge wearing a black T-shirt. The T-shirt said: “I ATE ALL THE PIES”.)

11Aug04 — 3

The B-Team

My life is very dull indeed. This is one reason why PooterGeek is mostly about other people—or just made up. Robert Harris once wrote an article about how the absence of world war had “deprived” his generation of Englishmen of a real heroic purpose in their lives. His father’s peers would tell their children tales of Dunkirk or the African desert, while Harris’s own contemporaries could only reminisce of “the day they won the Pizza Hut account”.

The scatological British spoof children’s comic, Viz, used to have a strip devoted to a family of conference organisers. The joke was that the medium of war stories, superheroes, and the improbable adventures of children with unique talents should devote a page to the bone-crushingly tedious scrapes of people who travel from provincial motel to provincial motel putting up poster boards. One of Cambridge’s clutch of local listings magazines is called Agenda. In the current issue there is an interview with an event organiser. The subject of this interview is cursed or blessed by a complete blindness to how boring his work is. Some might say that failing to appreciate how boring your work is is the key to huge success. If that is true, this man will go far:

“Sean Malone and his team are passionate about their work. He heads up Malone Associates in Fordham, Cambridgeshire, who number names such as Microsoft and Royal Bank of Scotland among their clients.”

I’m sure Malone Associates is completely different, but usually, in the flattened hierarchy, multi-tasking workplace of today, when a “team” is “headed up” it means “many underpaid graduates with multiple degrees struggle to compensate for the mistakes of one overpaid autocrat with a third in Estates Management from Durham” and “passionate” means that they “work excessively long hours because of poor planning and a macho culture of presenteeism“.

The page-turning continues:

“Sean remembers that fateful day…”

“That fateful day” Al-Qaeda loyalists stormed the Savoy during a blue chip CEO’s opening PowerPoint presentation? “That fateful day” Malone and his “team” had to make an emergency landing when the tail rotor of their ‘copter was lost during an approach to Docklands heliport for an international arms sales gathering?

No. “That fateful day” when…

“…we were offered a much larger room [at The Birmingham Metropole] at no extra charge.”

The excitement mounts:

“Several hours later—and with the clock ticking—disaster.”

Men in black balaclavas abseiled down from the roof and crashed in through the windows, tossing stun grenades and screaming Islamist lust for the blood of infidels?

“In our enthusiasm, no one had thought to measure the height of the new banner against the set. It was two feet higher than the original one, making the set look lost and miserable, with a big, ugly gap where it should have run flush with the ceiling.”

Stonehenge!

“It was already late evening and the team was tired already. What to do? It took just a few painful minutes to decide that our duty to professionalism meant that sleep was not a possibility. The set had to be rebuilt, and fast. In A-Team style, we set up a temporary wood yard…”

(The episode in which the A-Team‘s B A Baracus set up the temporary wood yard—where they could build a tree-house in which to imprison a group of South African drug-dealing neo-Nazis—was one of my favourites.)

“…in the moonlit carpark and set to work through the night. As dawn broke, the new, larger set was completed and put up in the space. The client never knew…”

Phew. I love it when a plan comes together.

[Spooky detail: the XEmacs spell-checker thinks that “Islamist” should be replaced with “Islamise”.]

09Aug04 — 0

Cut Off

Sorry, folks. I’ve not had Internet access from home for most of the weekend so I have some catching up to do. I’ve published a couple of posts I didn’t get to release on Saturday (under 07Aug04 below).

07Aug04 — 1

“…And A Box Of Swan Vestas, Please”

[Another oldie, I’m afraid]

I used to work in a corner shop. In my day the 12-year-olds who came in were, of course, little bastards, but they didn’t have sawn-off shotguns. If they had, I’d have been proud to have dealt with them like this:

“CCTV footage revealed the boy burst into the store on 8 May with a scarf around his face and hood over his head.

“He told the shopkeeper, Jasbir Guliani, to fill a black plastic bag with cash.

“Mr Guliani said there was no money in the till and, on instruction to load the bag with cigarettes instead, told the boy he was underage.

“The retailer later offered him sweets and crisps instead. “

07Aug04 — 8

Love Me, Love My Princess

As an “adorable half-caste African”, I have been far too slow to ‘Blog this one. The Guardian dents what could have been a funny, understated report by resorting to this clumsy smear:

“[Princess Michael] was born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, daughter of an Austrian father with connections to the Nazi party.”

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