22Jan04 — 2

Let Me Count the Ways

If you’ve got a QuickTime player, you probably visit trailers.apple.com for an occasional fix of gravelly voiceovers and exploding helicopters advertising the latest Hollywood releases.

Currently the big genres are still barrel-scraping comic book stories (The Punisher, Alien vs. Predator), unfunny chick flicks (Laws of Attraction, Pieces Of April) and historical epics (The Last Samurai, The Passion of the Christ).

In the last category, yesterday evening I re-watched the trailer for Troy that I saw at the cinema a few weeks back with a Harvard PhD friend, a friend who is proud not to read books for fun. In the sampler there is one truly awe-inspiring shot. The camera pulls away from a single warship until the screen is filled with an ocean of (no doubt computer-generated) sails.

My companion: “That’s a lot of ships.”
My reply: “Yes, a thousand.”
My companion: “Huh?”

16Jan04 — 2

I Couldn’t Make It Up

[Before you begin reading this item I want to make it clear that I have not invented a single one of the following quotes. Neither are they, to my knowledge, from parody sites.]

Adam keeps challenging me to address the Kilroy-Silk question. But what could I possibly contribute to such an elevated debate?

After he wrote on the subject in yesterday’s Arab News, Dr. Mohammad T. Al-Rasheed was bundled away by the Metaphor Police:

The upheaval of rebirth is upon Arabs. Like a difficult delivery operation, it needed outside intervention in the form of a caesarian section. The baby was not forthcoming on its own so others had to move in lest the mother, the baby, and probably a few relatives die in the process. The boil on the skin of the Arab world that heralded the presence of a plague, let alone a virus, was Bin Laden. The surgical knife that went in to eradicate the source of the boil was the American invasion of Iraq. The problem is that this nation has twenty-two wombs!

[I say again: that was a real quote from a real article about Kilroy-Silk.]

A letter writer to Malaysia Kimi (“only the news that matters”) wondered why K-S’s views are so much more “acceptable” to “the Western intelligentsia” than those of Malaysia’s very own “moonbat” Mahathir. These views are so “acceptable”, in fact, that coppertone Kilroy is currently seeking alternative employment. This, according to The Slough Express, means that “reality” TV family the Gardeners have been “left in the lurch” because they were due to appear on Kilroy. The star of the clan is “feisty 56-year-old barmaid” Kathy. She’s bearing up:

“I still get noticed doing everyday normal things like shopping in Asda. Just today I went to Burnham Beeches and someone even recognised my dog Oliver from the TV”

Let’s briefly go back to The Guardian, where Kilroy-Silk’s secretary, who precipitated the whole row by sending an old article into the Express, did her best to repair the damage:

“Robert is very fair-minded; and on his show he just lets everybody have their say. He is not a racist at all – he employs a black driver.”

Even Joe Royle, famed for his sports column in the East Anglian Advertiser, took time out before discussing [retiring Southampton manager] Gordon Strachan to address the Issue of Our Time. He began in a novel way by complaining of “political correctness gone mad”. Then he defended the, er, Arab people:

I certainly would not describe all Arabs as mutilators and terrorists. My youngest son’s best friend is Iraqi and his mother, a doctor, is the most charming woman you could meet and I count them as dear friends.

15Jan04 — 0

D-I-Y

Just before Christmas I had my (excellent) local garage re-connect and re-seat the underdash wiring of my car. The car was in for them to do a more serious repair, so I thought they might as well deal with the bunches of plugs that had become disconnected and were dangling into the passenger footwell.

“Simple job! You could do it yourself,” from the car bore at the back.

“Yeah, right.”

I am slightly nervous about the red light that is now continuously illuminated next to the steering wheel.

14Jan04 — 2

Yawn

Leasey’s been complaining [no, don’t roll your eyes, there’s more to this story] that PooterGeek has been getting too political lately and it’s boring her. “Boring”? You kids have no idea.

13Jan04 — 0

Some Words

The otherwise superb Chambers Dictionary that my parents bought me for Christmas lists the word “affluenza“, but not the word “afflatus“—checked in my Shorter Oxford before I deployed it yesterday. My edition of the Shorter doesn’t list “affluenza” of course.

PooterGeek is on the first page of Google hits for the misspelling of “autism” as “austism”—in the company of Massachusetts Department of Education. [Look in the title bar of your browser, not in the document itself.]

“Humorous” is spelt “humorous”, but “humorsome” is spelt “humorsome”. Why?

If you’re looking for word references on the Web, you could take advice from the American Library Association.

11Jan04 — 8

Bloody Students

When I was an undergraduate I spent my weekends fending off aggressive winos as I worked behind the counter in an edge-of-Oxford corner shop. A lot of my contemporaries would spend theirs flitting down to London to party with their pals. Ten years after graduation I started to earn enough money to live that kind of lifestyle, though I couldn’t afford the drugs.

Coming back from The Smoke this evening I sat on a near-empty train listening to two female undergraduates of the best university in the country talk about themselves and the torment that is their lives.

In a mixture of baby-speak, tortured grammar, Valley Girl and psycho-babble—

And I was like “I just feel this emptiness all the time“

—they swapped tales of the misery of “having parents that won’t set boundaries”, parents who, likelier than not, spent more than my gross income from my first job respectively each year having their daughters educated in the vain hope that they would learn the distinction between “amount” and “number” or the definition of “pretentiousness”. I choose this word because, at one wonderful point, the one wearing the “Stop the War” badge described the moment under psychological supervision when she had her life-defining “breakthrough” . (I, likelier than not, paid for the therapy that led to her recounted afflatus out of my taxes.) This breakthrough was the moment when she finally stopped “repressing her true emotions” and gave in to her first panic attack:

“I shed all these years of pretentiousness and truly felt at last”

It’ll be a long time before the pretentiousness is gone, love, but you keep working on it.

Once I got onto the platform I had to steer around two young white people with dreadlocks snogging each other in greeting. The detour was necessary because they were holding their right arms outstretched to avoid igniting each other’s rat’s-tails with their lit cigarettes. First-degree burns to the scalp would have been too good for the spoilt little inverted snobs and their “we wish we was black” spray-on poverty chic. Roll on top-up fees.

10Jan04 — 0

Dawk

Adam added a comment to the recent post about Brights (courtesy of Maoi). If Adam likes Dawkins-bashing, he’ll enjoy the on-going feud between Dawkins and ‘Blogging Labour MP Tom Watson. Watson produced a spoof yoof entry in his ‘Blog intended to parody attempts by middle-aged politicians to get “down with the kids”. Dawkins rather sloppily took the parody seriously and cited it in a Guardian article in which he argued against the lowering of the age of majority. Tom wouldn’t let it lie.

10Jan04 — 0

De-Spammed

You, dear Reader, probably won’t have noticed, but I have been irritated over the past few months by ‘Blog spam. The same people who write to you offering to enlarge your breasts/penis now post fake links to ‘Blogs. They have targeted PooterGeek in the hope of borrowing my legendary Google karma for their own tawdry sites. (You come higher in Google searches if other highly-rated sites link to you, so they embed links to their own sites in comments on mine.) I’m having none of it. As of half-an-hour ago, PooterGeek has been running MT-Blacklist. Die spammers, die.

09Jan04 — 0

Vertigo

The crazy kids at Jinx Magazine specialize in what they call “urban exploration”: going places in cities where they shouldn’t go. They value “anti-totalitarianism, humanism, and unnecessary risk-taking”. So that’ll explain why this entry won their “Best Photograph” competition [warning: large image].

09Jan04 — 1

New PooterGeeker

I feel a little bit like the landlord of a tiny village pub staring at a city newcomer by doing this, but we have a new contributor here at PooterGeek, that is we have one who hasn’t been drawn to join the growing community over at the Naked Harry Potter page. Dakujem thinks he knows where Molvania really is. Hello Dakujem! Let me buy you a drink and explain about the Post Office opening hours and the strange goings on up at the old manor house.

08Jan04 — 2

Putting A Stop To It

It looks like the Americans are going to get a Trussing too. Whatever the article says, the reason this humorous punctuation guide was such a bestseller in Britain at Christmas isn’t a mystery. In our crappy English comprehensives very few teachers teach punctuation well and very few pupils overcome the peer pressure not to learn. People would love to learn to write clearly, but no one gives them the chance. Instead, in English language lessons, they are asked to compose free-form poetry about war or try to write a news report in the style of a tabloid/broadsheet/comedy sketch. Why can’t someone just teach them how to write? The statistics make me want to cry. Elvis was always poor and hungry as child and never stopped being hungry when he was rich enough to feed himself to excess. Badly educated children grow up into adults who want their minds feeding.

I had the good fortune to grow up in a house containing English language textbooks. Once my mother had taught me to read, it seemed natural to pull some of the books down from the shelves and get my dad to teach me to write. If the teaching is witty and inventive, studying grammar can be fun—until a peer group of sour, lazy, incurious brats tells you that it’s “sad”.

Now. How long do you think it’ll be before my dad submits a comment to complain about a poorly punctuated adverbial sub-clause in the above post?

UPDATE: Shouldn’t the composite adjective “zero tolerance” in the book’s subtitle be hyphenated?

07Jan04 — 0

Quote for the Day

I am currently alternating between two of my Christmas books as bedtime reading: What Philosophers Think, edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, and Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys. The latter is a polished crystal of popular science writing. Spufford describes technological phenomena in a concrete, evocative way (“smaller engines filled the air with the sound of ripping linen, magnified titanically”) and with great attention to detail.

In a month in which the US landed a probe on Mars and Europe smeared one across the planet’s surface it seems particularly appropriate that I should be reading one part of Spufford’s book. In it, he quotes the father of modern rocket science, Wernher Von Braun, on his research group’s decision to surrender to the Americans after World War II, thereby handing the US immediate leads in missile technology and the space race:

“we feared the Russians, we despised the French, and the British could not afford us.”

06Jan04 — 0

Ethan Rising

Yesterday Judith emailed in reply to my post about the doll called Eitan. She said she had the impression that the English equivalent of “Eitan”, “Ethan”, was becoming a more and more popular boys’ name. She’s right. Also yesterday, by coincidence, The Office of National Statistics published the latest report on the most popular boys‘ and girls‘ names in the UK. In 1999 Ethan was 40th, in 2000: 32nd, in 2001: 21st, in 2002: and in 2003 it was 15th.

05Jan04 — 0

Missing Alynzia

I hadn’t heard from Alynzia for months (since her last comment on PooterGeek in fact) so I went looking for her online and found that her Website has disappeared. Let us know you’re still alive, Ms Newton! And do you have anything to do with TheAristotleEngine?

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