08Nov03 — 0

An Excuse For Some Glamour

I meant to post this at the start of the week when it was topical.

My dad used to think Bill Kenwright was a great producer. Charlotte used to think that Tennessee Williams was a great playwright. Judith used to think Ashley Judd was the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. So that’s three people who might be interested.

07Nov03 — 0

Golden Girl

It’s proud Uncle Damian time now, so the rest of you can browse somewhere else to check out pictures of other Website owners’ cats.

It was my niece Maisie‘s 1st birthday last month. I was at her birthday party and here are some photos I took with a second-hand lens that my brother-in-law Steve kindly drove me to Derby to buy. It collected some particularly lovely colours onto good old Fuji Press 800 film.

There are a lot of nice shots, but my favourites are:

  • this one of Maisie with some wrapping paper,
  • this series of cousins Imogen and Isobel blowing out the candles,
  • this one of Auntie Angie gracefully accepting her consolation prize after the rigged pass-the-parcel game,
  • this one of Clare smiling,
  • this one featuring Maisie’s amazing golden curls,
  • this one of Imogen looking on while Steve plays with my gift to Maisie (a musical apple—every home should have one),
  • this one of Imogen caught picking her nose,
  • and another of her looking soulful,
  • and, of course, this amazing series, taken while the whole family watched Maisie take her first three steps in a row—Clare says that Maisie is quite a walker now.

There’s also at least one shot that Auntie Sarah took of me looking as comfortable as ever holding a small child. And doesn’t Maisie look comfortable too?

(My next lot of photos will be from an only-slightly-more-grown-up party—one with a “Hollywood/Bollywood” theme.)

06Nov03 — 0

Whodunnit?

Microsoft will offer a bounty of $250 000 to anyone giving information leading to the conviction of virus writers*. Someone on Slashdot pointed out that this was reminiscent of O. J. Simpson swearing not to rest until Nicole Simpson’s real killer is found.

*Yes, I know I should use the phrase “worm writers”.

05Nov03 — 1

Heart-Shaped Tag

It’s the question every divorcing couple must ask: “Who gets the Beanie Babies?”. The answer: someone on Ebay. [I recommend you read the whole of the seller’s description to enjoy this surreal slice of Internet life fully.]

04Nov03 — 0

Going Down

Google Zeitgeist is a cruel place. Every modern decline and fall begins on this page summarizing the current state of Web searches. The latest losers:

  • David Blaine—number two declining query for the week ending 27Oct03
  • Manchester United—displaced as most popular football team search by Arsenal and Real Madrid
  • Britney Spears—from most popular search on the Web to nowhere in a matter of weeks.
04Nov03 — 1

Evil Or Stupid Or Both?

I am not going to link to the recent Guardian articles by Tariq Ali and George Monbiot about Iraq, just to the rather better and cleverer (Left-wing) ‘Bloggers who take them apart: Harry Hatchet and Norman Geras.

Just as I cancelled my subscription to the right-wing Spectator because it continued to employ the racist, snobbish “Taki”, I find it harder and harder to hand over my money for The Guardian to employ people like Ali and Monbiot.

03Nov03 — 2

Positives and Negatives

Regular PooterGeekers have probably registered free for The New York Times already. It might be worth it for newcomers to do so too, so they can read its Onion-esque headline about the situation in Iraq today:

“Despite Positives, More Negatives Are Predicted“

On Saturday night I went out to a “pirates and whores” party with the spectacularly fancy-dressed Nicholas and Hind. (My costume consisted of a borrowed eyepatch.) We are all old farts now and hardly touched a drop between us (recent father Nicholas: “I’ve forgotten how to communicate with drunk people”). Despite their huge investment in outfits—even Hind’s five-month-old baby bump sported a fetching skull-and-crossbones cummerbund—we spent a grand total of an hour-and-a-half at the party. And I spent a large chunk of that arguing with Omar, one of Hind’s Palestinian friends, about Iraq. Apparently, the Iraqis were better off under Saddam.

Omar lives in London. He is a merchant banker.

UPDATE: Oliver lives in London. He is also a merchant banker.

01Nov03 — 0

Morality Play

This one’s a little higher brow than yesterday’s test of your ability to distinguish females from “shemales”. Butterflies and Wheels have recently added a new morality quiz. In exchange for five minutes of effort (and some finely Jesuitical reasoning) on your part they will tell you where you fall in their morality spectrum and point out the philosophical flaws in your moral eyeglasses.

My only advice to you is to read the small print of the instructions very closely; you are up against philosophers. More important than the compilers’ assessment of you 😉 is the accompanying comparison with everyone else who took the test. (If you are familiar with the motivations, content and proprietors of the site you will know that B&W readers are generally smarter than the average bear. )

01Nov03 — 0

Yeah Yeah Yeah

One of the many lovely things about my sister’s wedding a couple of years ago was her choice of turn* for the reception: a Beatles tribute band called the Beat-Alls, a bunch of East Midlanders who turn into moptops for the weekends, duplicating everything from the vintage instruments to the accents. And “Paul” learned to play left-handed!

In the title essay of Travels in Hyperreality—alongside a lot of pretentious wank—Umberto Eco identified a curious phenomenon of modern museums and theme parks: they create an invented replica of an historical world that is more like our perception of that world than the real thing would be if we could travel through time to experience it.

Barry Miles is Paul McCartney’s biographer. On Radio 4 this morning he marvelled at his experiences of attending Beatles conventions. The Beatles never performed Sergeant Pepper live, and they certainly didn’t wear the suits on stage. It wasn’t possible to perform the record live when it was made. Using current music technology four men can recreate the sound of the album exactly. In front of hordes of convening Beatle-nerds, a bunch of American musicians do so. Wearing the suits.

*northern English slang for live performer, esp. at a working men’s club

31Oct03 — 1

A Little Bit Extra

Never believe anything a television producer tells you.

UPDATE: PooterGeek sinks to a new low. For those of you who want a picture of the (wo)man in question go here and for those of you who want to test your own powers of sexual discrimination go here

30Oct03 — 0

Cambridge: The Excitement Continues

Driving in to work along open, tree-lined country roads this week I’ve felt like one of those square-jawed “executives” in a car advertisement. Around here the countryside rolls like a piece of slate, but the flatness doesn’t make the local villages any less attractive than the traditional English postcard model. Every tree seems to be lit from inside with that glittering Cambridge light that the weather people keep telling me is the area’s compensation for being so bone-achingly cold through the winter—no cloud cover, you see.

Cambridge remains boring as Hell, however.

Yesterday’s sole front-page story/headline from the Cambridge Weekly News:

Teenagers Blow Up Pet With Firework

Terrified Cambridge residents can only ask themselves: “When will the hamster carnage end?”

(I think it’s time for a special Cambridge Weekly News story category, because the “Media” heading seems inappropriate for the esteemed organ.)

29Oct03 — 0

Out of the Mouths

David Deutsch, the computational physicist, and others argue that we should take children more seriously. The Paper is a publication that does just that. It is written by 10–18-year-olds under the supervision of professional journalists. Some of the results of this publishing experiment explain why we David and friends have such difficulty persuading the World to respect the the views of children.

28Oct03 — 0

Pinheads on Angels

Two religious items caught my ear on the Today Programme this morning.

The first: a Muslim activist has won a case to have the crucifix removed from the Italian public (state) school his children attend. He is happy. Other Muslims are not. Neither are many Italians.

The second: Thought for the Day, the programme’s “God spot”, was delivered by a vicar from Brighton. He used the story of an English madam recently convicted in Paris to support his argument against the encroachment of the state into matters of “personal morality”—“who were the victims of the crime?” he asked. He believes that the obsession with people’s private lives is symbolic of our growing inability to distinguish between the truly right and the truly wrong. Anyone with a clue knows he wasn’t really talking about prostitution.

11Sep03 — 5

PooterGeek On Ice

Yesterday I transferred from MPhil to PhD status at the Institute of Cancer Research, where I have been registered as a part-time PhD student since Michael Jackson was black. (I would love to be able to tell the story of my viva, but can’t.) One mad year of frenzied experimenting and writing from today I hope to finish at last.

From October I am also going to be writing a related book. There will be a cash advance in my bank account as a carrot and a contract with a written 18-month deadline as a stick.

I’ve already mentioned this to a couple of PooterGeekers, but this is the official announcement: because of these two (admittedly pleasing) developments there will be no time for me to maintain PooterGeek properly.

While I can still compete with Dr Berlinski here’s the current score:

“Damian.Counsell”: 1940
“Claire.Berlinski”: 995

. Maybe I should install Movable Type at berlinski.com so Claire can gloat on her own ‘Blog as she reverses the balance of Google-power.

I’ll archive the existing content here and fold in all those old pre-Movable Type entries from the early days. I’m keeping the PooterGeek domain, but in a month or so I’ll shut down the comments system so that those Naked Harry Potter fans shut up. [Whoops, I did it again.]

It’s been fun. Thank you for your attention and contributions.

No, the date I chose to declare the end of this journal wasn’t a coincidence.

I’ll be back.

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