07Jun04 — 0

Throne

This photograph may take a while to appear because the site seems to be under heavy load, but it's worth the wait to see an ordinary piece of domestic furniture in a new light. Read the caption to find out how it was created.

06Jun04 — 2

Nutter

What possesses someone to spend months building their own tank, climb in, armed to the teeth, smash up a couple of buildings with it, and then kill himself? At least no one else died. If only the poor guy had started a 'Blog, he could have worked all that anger out in a harmless, creative way.

06Jun04 — 1

Toodle Gip

Ronald Reagan was responsible for some spectacularly nasty things. He was also (as I have noted here before) hugely misrepresented by the media. Mark Steyn glosses over Reagan's nastiness, but makes clear that the real guilty, back in the days of my youth, were those who glossed over the evil of Reagan's, and our, enemies. As so often, Steyn's words on Reagan's death make another piercingly sharp opinion piece. I defy anyone to name a better columnist working in the English language today.

06Jun04 — 0

Moan Moan Moan

Everything around here was down again last night and this morning: no PooterGeek, no counsell.com, no loveandbentspoons.com, no email, no nuffink. Apologies to people who might have been trying to contact me lately. It's not my fault—I pay the rent on time.

I have a backlog of improvements planned: I want to start a PooterGeek interview system; I want to change my 'Blogging software from Movable Type (currently running PooterGeek) to “WordPress” (a truly free alternative); and I want to re-organise and supplement the gallery content (I did at least manage to upgrade the software running that this week). I'm too busy, but the technical problems aren't helping. I'll make the improvements eventually, trust me.

06Jun04 — 0

Long Live Brenda

God Save The Queen is an excellent, thoughtful, new 'Blog. In contrast to PooterGeek, I doubt its author will ever storm out of the bathroom mid-shower to denounce something he's just heard on BBC Radio 4. The latest two posts there are insightful about the successful exercise of state power through history. Claire [the llama is just a good friend] might be interested in GSTQ's comparison between the British way of doing things and Russian and German examples.

One of the things that always puzzles me about the anti-war crowd is their near-complete ignorance of the professed motivations of al-Qaeda, and their indifference to the response of the US to the terrorists' main demand. GSTQ's proprietor correctly identifies the latter, in the context of recent Western military action, as an example of the “crush and concede” approach to violent opposition.

“Crush and concede” perhaps, also describes the exit Sharon is trying to make from Gaza. It's also the story of the old bastard's life. Talking of this, and leading on from my correpondence with Judith earlier this week, I wish Israel was led by someone with the moral authority to act strongly and justly, so I could back my general sympathy for Israel with approval of its government.

04Jun04 — 1

Big And Dumb

Never go to the supermarket on an empty stomach. As your blood glucose falls, the bright colours and bleeping will disorient you, the myriad choices will overwhelm you, and, worst of all, you will hear the carbs calling, calling. You will leave with enough noodles to start your own Thai restaurant and three family packs of sherbert-filled flying saucers.

This afternoon, I compounded this classic error by going to ASDA, grocers to Britain's underclass and subsidiary of the USA's Wal-Mart. This is Cambridge ASDA, of course, so our chavs have higher degrees in trailer park ecology and are only fat because they are doing evening classes in sumo wrestling. ASDA being a national chain, these subtleties of local demographics are lost to the central marketing machine, so what is obviously a nationwide joke by middle-class ad execs at the expense of the proletariat could be rumbled by its local targets, causing the company embarrassment. Remember: I am not making this up; if you are living in the UK you can read packaging identical to that I am about to describe to you in your own neighbourhood ASDA. Near to the shop entrance is the ready-made sandwich fridge. There are three ranges of product inside it, each with its own logo and colourscheme. The top-of-the-line takeaway food goes under the “Extra Special” banner, while the extra size and extra pure ranges are respectively labelled (in all-lowercase Helvetica) “go large” and “go simple”.

(Will someone explain why they are running a surreal promotion promising that, if I drink enough of their Ribena, I will qualify for a free inflatable donkey? Supposedly it has something to do with this movie, but I think someone just had an inflatable donkey surplus—they're less popular than the inflatable sheep perhaps?)

When I got home, still suffering from malnutrition, I couldn't find my mobile phone, but I'd lost the receiver for my land line so I had to page my home phone handset from its base, so I could call my mobile, so I could look up who had been calling me earlier and not left a message. It was me.

04Jun04 — 0

Unique

Omigod. Someone has identified PooterGeek as the target of a Googlewhack: “two words—no quote marks with a single, solitary result”. And the magic combination is “fornicating Strepsil“. Enjoy it now while it lasts. (“Strepsil” is hardly a dictionary word, though, so it's a bit of a fiddle.)

03Jun04 — 0

Eng-er-land

I browse Football365, a magnet for poncey, middle-class types like me who watch football twice a year, as well as people who take the game seriously enough to talk crap about it. They have some new shirts for sale in their shop, in time for Euro 2004. This is a good one, and so's this.

03Jun04 — 0

Energy

Sorry to resort to the same edition of Private Eye again, but I have to share this with my American friends. It's from a regular column in the magazine called “Luvvies” to which readers submit ridiculous quotes from actors. This week's was from Emmy Rossum, being interviewed in Vanity Fair:

“We were doing this scene in the morgue, and I'm lying on the table, my eyes closed, and the energy that was coming off Sean [Penn] was so powerful I started to cry. And Clint Eastwood says, 'Cut, Emmy, that was great, but you can't cry. You're dead.'”

While we're on the subject of energy, did you know it was possible to produce a funky advertisement for a company specializing in energy distribution and transmission? You do now. (Via Simon Carr.)
[requires Flash, not tested on animals, wash dark colours separately]

03Jun04 — 0

Gasp

A few weeks back I attended a seminar by one of the creators of the World's first “knockout mouse”. Such a creature is exactly like others of its species except that a scientist has removed one or more genes from it, for the usual scientific reason: to see what happens. Back in the 80s, creating such a beastie was a Very Big Deal. Now, if you google for “knockout mouse” you will get a bunch of ads from companies offering to custom breed one for you.

To many people's surprise, one of the weirdest things about knockout mice is that often they aren't weird at all. Some guy in a white coat comes along and chops out a gene that is supposedly “crucial” to, say, the mouse immune system and the resulting mouse grows up to do all the usual mousey things in the usual mousey way, without so much as a bad sneeze.

This week, things got even stranger. Lab mice: they just don't give a toss.

01Jun04 — 1

Innocence

The biggest 'Blog in Britain is written by a prostitute. One of the biggest mainstream US news stories about 'Blogging broke when an intern sleeping with US government employees for money was outed by another 'Blogger. When it comes to Weblogs, the Anglo media have one thing on their minds and it isn't the potentially disruptive effect of devolved news-gathering and collaboration.

Despite the (completely illogical) pleas of a PooterGeek regular that I turn this into a male “Carrie's diary“, there's not much sex on PooterGeek, but, occasionally, a sex story makes me laugh so much I have to cover it. I just can't believe I missed this one a week ago.

It seems that pre-teens have a new craze to upset their parents with: “sex bracelets”. According to the US tabloid New York Post

“girls wear the bracelets around their wrists, and if a boy runs up and rips one off, he gets a 'coupon' from the girl to perform whatever sex act the color stands for.

A black bracelet indicates sexual intercourse, blue is oral sex, red is a lap dance or French kiss and white is a homosexual kiss…[g]reen represents having sex outside.”

It's not the tabloid hysteria about the bragging of fornicating minors; it's the quote from one of the children's parents that makes this one for me:

“Megan Stecher, 11, a fifth-grader who sells the $1 bracelets to her classmates at Holy Child Jesus School in Richmond Hill, Queens, for $1.25 said her teachers are not aware of what they symbolize.

Megan's mother, Michelle Stecher, 33, originally thought it was an innocent fashion fad.

'I thought it was an outrageous Britney Spears phase, like Madonna used to do in the '80s with the black rubber bracelets,' she said.

'But when I found out, I was outraged. I sent her to Catholic school to avoid things like this.'”

Mother of God, the cluelessness. It can only be that Michelle Stecher has never been within 10 miles of a Catholic school (or a Catholic girl) in her thirty-three years.

You probably don't want to waste five minutes of your own life reading the whole thing; I'm sure you could generate your own boilerplate fake-outrage-wrestles-with-the-urge-to-titillate copy.

[picked up via I Love Jenna Bush, as was this “do-we-laugh-or-cry?” story]

31May04 — 0

Almost Like A Whale

Imagine, for a moment, a new men’s fashion: “the ab-shirt”.

It is the summer of 2006 and David Beckham is photographed with his second wife, holidaying on a private island. He is sauntering along the beach wearing flip-flops, shorts and… a T-shirt with a rectangular window cut away from the midriff to reveal his toned stomach.

A couple of months later, at the end of July, men all over Britain are dressed like Becks, but, instead of windows opening onto six-packs, two-thirds of the fashion victims are exposing soft, straining beer bellies. A lump of lard bursts shamelessly out of each cotton frame. White men scratch their gut-flesh where it has been burned to red flakiness by the sun, until it turns a carroty orange as we drift into an Indian summer.

The reason I describe this scenario in such detail is because I want to shock my UK readers out of their familiarity into seeing just how horrible British women’s fashion has become recently. Two German female friends of mine had a conversation with me about this last year. They were amazed that people weren’t staring and pointing every time they walked down the street.

I will look back on the noughties as the “inner-tube decade”, when British women from 15 to 40 thought it would be a good idea to combine cut-off tops and lo-slung jeans. For 17-year-olds who have home gyms this can have quite an effect. Others who don’t have the figure for it wind up hooking twin, creased buffers of fat over the backs of their Levi’s. To my compounded disgust, this “bumper” effect is now occasionally combined with—God help us all—a female mullet hairdo. If it wouldn’t get me arrested I would go round town and photograph some of the most upsetting examples to post here. In its favour, I suppose, this look spares single girls the trouble of turning me down.

31May04 — 0

Just A Suggestion

Some surprising sources have hinted at incompetence on the part of the Saudi security forces in allowing the escape of three out of four racist mass-murderers. This an egregious libel, of a sort not heard since the promotion of conspiracy theories alleging that Saudi Arabia was in some way involved in terrorist attacks on the people of the US mainland. Of course, if the Saudi military are having some teensy-weensy temporary problems protecting the many non-Muslims who have come to the country from overseas to work, one answer might be to station UK or US troops there, ready to offer immediate assistance to the locals in such crises.

30May04 — 2

“That’s Not A Knife. This Is A Knife.”

An American correspondent wrote to me yesterday to say nice things about PooterGeek. In his email he confessed to being puzzled about certain aspects of British culture as presented on these pages. For example, he couldn’t get his head round the idea that people in this country would be embarrassed to go out and buy a nose-hair trimmer.

I think the size of the ocean between our countries is illustrated by comparing the discreet, inexpensive item I mentioned to in my posting earlier in the week with what Americans think of as a nose-hair trimmer: “the Turbo-Groomer 5.0“. Or perhaps it’s Thunderbird 3.

29May04 — 3

Charred Teddy Bears

This is a perfect moment to deploy this photograph that I took in the Mill Road in Cambridge three weeks ago. Over at Belmont Club there’s an entry pointing at an amusing idea for a war simulation game:

“I want a War Sim where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a ‘nuclear missile silo’, only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage. I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack.”

Next, it moves on to quote Army Magazine‘s piece, Sun Tzu’s Bad Advice: Urban Warfare in the Information Age, thusly:

“We do not live in Sun Tzu’s world, nor even in that of Clausewitz, Fuller or Liddell Hart. The modern world has urbanized to an unprecedented degree, and it is inconceivable that future military contingencies will not involve urban operations. Sun Tzu lived and wrote (if indeed he was a real person) in the agrarian age, when most of the land was either wilderness or cultivated. Large segments of the population lived outside cities, and warfare typically occurred in flat, open terrain. Such battlefields–the stomping grounds of warriors from Sun Tzu to Napoleon–are becoming scarcer each day. Furthermore, the very success of American joint operations–and joint fires in particular–guarantee that a clever opponent will move into cities for protection. The modern battlefield is urban.”

I am now counting down to the first rebuttal comment from Timbeaux or Duff.

This item formally launches a new PooterGeek subject category…

29May04 — 0

Flip-Flop

Earlier on I stated that Iyad Allawi was the “US choice” for Iraqi Prime Minister because that’s the impression I had been given by BBC Radio 4 yesterday evening.

This morning, the BBC News site had the headline “US backs caretaker PM”, suggesting that the Americans had merely approved of the Iraqi Governing Council’s decision to put Allawi forward. [I’ve changed my posting accordingly.]

Now, when you click on the BBC News link “US backs caretaker PM”, you get the headline “US distances itself from Iraqi PM“.

Huh?

So the Americans are supposedly less approving. Does this mean that Toby Dodge will have to start saying what a wise choice the new PM is?

29May04 — 0

I Just Want To Be Your Friend

I don’t censor PooterGeek (except for libel), so the posts at the infamous Naked Harry Potter entry get more numerous and bizarre with time. [That page is now only fifth hit at Google for the search “Naked Harry Potter”.] One new comment arrived yesterday while I was logged on. Because of this I could check the posting with my referrer logs. The author, “Josh”, used the medium of PooterGeek to write to Emma Watson, the child actor who plays the character Hermione in the eponymous series of wizardly private school romps. I’m sure she’s a regular here and will be flattered to read what he wrote:

“I LOVE YOU EMMA!!!!!!!!!! REALLY… IM NOT A PERV LIKE THE REST OF THESE PEOPLE…JUST WANTED U TO KNO…WRITE BACK!”

I should perhaps let Emma know that the search terms that brought the love-struck and non-pervy “Josh” to PooterGeek were:

“harry+potter+porn”

for which PooterGeek is about to become another top hit, I suspect. Men, eh?

Just in case I haven’t said this enough already, Harry Potter bores me senseless. Why don’t you Potterfreaks go away and set up a page counting down the days to Watson becoming “legal” or something?

29May04 — 0

“Expert”

Yesterday evening I listened to Warwick University‘s Iraq “expert”, Toby Dodge, tell BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight that the Iraqi Governing Council’s choice for Prime Minister was “the worst one possible”. His argument seemed plausible and well-informed. Then I had a google into Dr Dodge’s past.

Here he is arguing that only offering to lift sanctions “would bring the Iraqi’s [sic] back to the [weapons inspection negotiations] table”. He begins that piece with a variant on the old favourite that journos wheel out when profiling Fidel Castro:

“How is it that two American Presidents have left the White House while President Saddam Hussein is still in power in Iraq?”

Just my wild, non-expert lob at the political theory dartboard, Toby, but it could have been because the USA is a democracy where there is a limit on the length of the presidency and Iraq was a dictatorship where opponents were fed to starving dogs. Anyway, it’s a bit academic now, since Saddam’s last public appearance was in front of the nit nurse.

Here he is telling The Guardian what it wanted to hear about the Iraq war back in November 2002 (that’s yesterday, according to the Royal Mail)

“The US claims a war against Saddam would be quick. Wrong, says analyst Toby Dodge, the conflict could be long and bloody”

By March 2003, along with much of the rest of the punditocracy, the good doctor was playing the “Stalingrad” card:

by the time you get to where American forces are at the moment, on the outskirts of Baghdad, when you come across the better armed, the better trained, the highly-motivated troops of the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard, there’s going to be a hell of a fight…
“…I think with the United States itself, domestically facing a recession, with growing unease in the media about the war and with lots of body bags coming home, there’s a distinct chance that as soon as they get to Baghdad, they’ll pull out.”

To which the correct response is: “D’oh“.

Later in the same discussion, he shows that his “expertise” doesn’t just extend to the Iraqi armed forces:

“I think we’ll see American troops on the edge of Baghdad for as much as two or three weeks, while they bring in more troops, more heavy armour, and while they consolidate their hold on the rest of the country, and that’s bound to take a long time. Then after that, if there hadn’t been a coup, if there hasn’t been movement in Baghdad, they’ll try and move into the city…
“…So I think what we’re actually going to see is a slow and bloody war of attrition as US troops take the Iraqi suburbs, street by street, until they get to the centre of Baghdad. Now that, rather sadly, will kill thousands and thousands of Iraqis, maybe hundreds and hundreds of Americans, and will make Saddam look like the winner.”

Er, wrong again, Tobes.

The World Tonight: late and unlistened-to; where the desperate pundits go.

28May04 — 0

Not The Done Thing

I only discovered the satire site Social Scrutiny earlier this week. Here’s a good one from a “report” on Tuesday about the doomed Beagle 2 space probe:

“Beagle 2 – too ‘irredeemably British to succeed’, according to report.

ESA Departmental Head, Dirk Porn pointed to what he called “The Henman Effect” to explain the Mission’s failings. ‘The British give it their absolute all right up to the moment before they win. Then they decide that winning isn’t very dignified and that ‘taking-part’ is much more important.'”

28May04 — 0

Bzz

If I tell you the real reason why I came upon the following page is that I was surfing Amazon for a birthday gift for my mother, you might think one of two things:

  1. “How could he be so rude about his mum?”
  2. “Does he really think we’ll believe that story?”

If you’ve ever been hypnotized by a colleague’s nostril ‘tache or experienced the pain that accompanies plucking the little buggers out of your own nasal cavities you must admit some interest in the reasonably priced “Wahl wet and dry nose trimmer”. And you’re not going to join the queue in Boots and buy one in public, are you? Hey, it’s number one in the top one hundred personal care products; you’d have looked, too.

Anyway, the point of this post is to share with you the two user-submitted reviews currently on display:

“4 out of 5 stars Wowzer!, March 18, 2004
Reviewer: gravyboatsailor from Portsmouth, Hants United Kingdom
This is a nose hair trimmer. It trims the hairs in your nose.

“5 out of 5 stars Hedge trimmer, April 23, 2004
Reviewer: harry_stottle from Battle, East Sussex United Kingdom
I concur with the previous review; this is a nose hair trimmer. However it can also trim those hairs that sprout from ones ears. I’m sure one could expand its use to include other orifices, but I wouldn’t recommend it.“

God help anyone who mistakes it for a vibrator.

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