06Jun03 — 0

Fast As Lightning

Little Lisa is good at accents. Mike, who’s from Ireland, remains non-plussed, however, by the way she frequently slips into Oirish when she encounters him.

How apt, then, that when Mike was introduced to a new PhD student of oriental origin yesterday he should be the one to fill a lull in conversation by asking the poor guy if he had “ever done any martial arts”. The correct response would have been: “Ah so! I vereh mush enjoy demonstrating my karate chops by sricing your fine Irish potatoes in two.”.

05Jun03 — 1

On a More Serious Note

Thanks to Adam Woolfe for alerting me to this sensible and passionate article about the Aqaba talks written by a Palestinian human rights campaigner in Ha’aretz.

Thanks to Claire Berlinski for this one about the expansion of democracy. (I should have posted it two days ago.) It’s one of those arguments that sounds crazy at first, but more and more sensible as you continue to read it.

Whoa. Multiple readers; multiple submissions; ‘Blogging in my lunch hour; this is becoming more like a proper Weblog every day.

05Jun03 — 552

Naked Harry Potter

I had a conversation with two unlikely PooterGeek “fans” at lunch today—I mean yesterday: I fell asleep and have just woken up after midnight. (Hello Adam and Martin, by the way.) They were intrigued by the weird success of my Webpages with search engines.

This ‘Blog entry is an experiment born of that conversation. I reckon that, within a month from now, this page will be the number one hit on Google UK (if not the World) for the phrase “Naked Harry Potter”. Like Pete Townshend, if the police come to arrest me for child pornography offences, I will claim I was “doing research”.

I think I might be able to get away with a caution too, if I am co-operative and turn over my referer logs to the authorities.

Charlotte Church nude!

03Jun03 — 0

More War Crimes

Just look at the awful consequences when those imperialist bastards send their troops to the Third World in clear violation of international law. (If your preferences for BBC News are set to “outside the UK” rather than “UK” and you go to the BBC News front page there’s currently a link to a video of “Sierra Leone’s war brides” being “reunited with their families”, but my Real Player won’t play it so I take no responsibility for your witnessing the horrific fallout of colonial oppression. It’s probably all about diamonds or oil or something. Damn the White Man and his thieving ways.)

03Jun03 — 0

Huh?

Who reads my Webpages? Disappointed people, mainly…

I am responsible for the fourth highest hit if you search UK pages for “anti-capitalist Weblog” at Google UK.

What’s more, because I made a flip remark in my old gallery pages about one of my colleagues looking like said film star, it’s also on the first page of results (twice!) if you search Google Images for “Tia Carrera”.

Why? Well, her name is actually “Tia Carrere” and my site carried one of the not-so-rare misspelled captions. (In Google’s database are two pages of incorrectly labelled images, and less than one page of correctly labelled images.) The photo in question is long gone from counsell.com, but still the hordes come.

I have recently acquired a regular female reader, however, who thinks this ‘Blog should mutate into a Sex In The City-style memoir (call me a pedant, but a vital element might be missing from that plan), and who—despite being somewhat younger than me—wishes to adopt a “big sister” role in sorting out my love-life. This is not likely to keep her very busy, but she claims that she can help. Tough gig.

03Jun03 — 0

Anyone Who Had a Heart

Please don’t ask me how I came to be browsing “www.pacemakerclub.com“. Running down the right-hand side of their front page they have links to their readers’ emails, to which other readers can reply. Each link is the title of the respective message.

Along with “Want to use heart monitor when running” (1 reply) and “Weird symptoms after getting pacemaker” (2 replies), there’s one labelled “Still not working, any ideas out there?”. That’s got to be an urgent message—despite this: zero replies.

02Jun03 — 0

Holy Moly

God Forbid are a five-piece heavy metal band from Connecticut, USA. They have a token white member, but otherwise bring a new meaning to the phrase “black music”. Christ-on-a-bike, they’re extreme, but they can obviously play. Despite their technical competence I stopped listening to their free MP3s when one of my fillings was shaken loose.

01Jun03 — 0

Evil Bingoer

Dad, if it hasn’t already been reported on that infernal televisual contraption, you should print this one out for mum—it combines bingo, grannies, and a great opportunity for righteous indignation.

01Jun03 — 0

Celebrity Deathmatch II

I missed this one last weekend. The BBC interviewed “experts” to argue the case over war in Iraq retrospectively. The interviews are available on video, but in each case I have linked to the transcripts.

In the pro corner: Ann Clywd, left-wing Labour MP and human rights campaigner; Wyn Bowen, lecturer at King’s College London and former UN weapons inspector. In the anti corner: Bianca Jagger, former consort of 60s rocker Mick.

According to Bianca, life is no better now for the Iraqis than under Saddam, the only things the Americans sought to protect in their prosecution of the war were the Oil Ministry and the oil fields and George Bush Snr.—unlike his son—“genuinely tried” to bring peace to the Middle East.

She may have a point about Nicaragua, though.

31May03 — 0

Fancy a Shag?

There are a lot of things I love about Britain. Some of them are a surprise even to me. I remember returning from work trips to California, Arizona, and southern Italy, a year or so ago and being overwhelmed, by comparison, with the green soft beauty of this country’s landscape.

One thing I hate about Britain is its drinking “culture”. Strangely enough, yesterday evening I did exactly what this article about that problem suggests and walked around the centre of town—I visited Cambridge’s wonderful Borders “hyper-bookshop” which, amazingly, stays open until 10 o’clock on a Friday night.

On my way home, the zoo animals were just beginning to get lively. Gel-crested males were puffing out their striped chests. Female tits were on display. The air was full of the promise of clumsy violence and bad sex.

Women of England, lament not the death of Romance! ‘Twas at your hands she died. You have taught all Englishmen that the surest way to win your favours is to grope you when you are drunk. Why bother with flowers when a few doses of the latest alcopop will do the job just fine? This month saw the release of a new one called, with disarming directness, Shag.

26May03 — 0

Thanks, Dad and Mum

Back from my parents’ where I participated in a UN-inspired “computing for food” swap. They gave me lunch and dinner; I removed 1496 copies of the Klez worm and installed a virus checker.

I also took photos, but they won’t let me post them to my Website. Protest now, PooterGeek readers!

25May03 — 0

Running Shoes. For Running In.

Every few months I have to go into a “sports” clothing shop, push my way through terminally unathletic people in Russell Athletic sweat shirts, step around pot-bellied blokes in Nikes who are unlikely to “just do it” or (anything else) any time soon and ask that question, the question that will penetrate the cookie-cutter hip-hop being strained through the nasty in-store sound system and precipitate a Bateman-esque craning of necks and rounding of eyes:

“Are these running shoes?”

The answer is usually the one I received yesterday:

“No, those are cross-trainers”

My ritual response:

“Oh. I’d like to buy some running shoes. For running in.”

I am no great athlete and I am no great photographer, but my attitude to sports equipment and my attitude to photographic equipment are very similar. Well-chosen, cheap gear will cope with the capabilities of 99% of the enthusiastic amateur population. That Nikon camera body carved from pure nanotubular carbon will not change your mundane snapshots into anything other than massively expensive mundane snapshots; those air-filled soles are of no consequence if all you are going to do is hang out on a street corner, though they might make fleeing from a store detective slightly more comfortable.

Anyway, I rejected the various ribbed, semi-transparent, pumped beasties (with added TechnoBabble™!) for the next-to-cheapest Adidas pair because (after some tinkering) they fit well, support my feet in the important places and have a good system for adjusting the laces to differing tensions in different parts of the instep. I ran a bit faster this morning than I did in my old Nikes, but it’s probably a placebo effect. Or maybe it’s the three glittery stripes down the sides.

And if you want a wonderful 35mm SLR body, complete with a more-than-adequate lens, for the price of a poor digital, you could do worse than this one (under this name in US). What other technology can you get for under £250 these days? Under weird light conditions, using the fastest and grainiest of film, this near-bottom-of-the-range hardware still produces images like this. For the more ambitious, wanting greater flexibility, especially in taking pictures of human subjects, you could try this, rather more expensive, superzoom. (The purists consider it a crime against serious photography to use a lens like this, but any limitations in its optics are more than swamped by focusing and handling errors made by less-than-elite users—including most of the whining camera nerds.)

Don’t even get me started on gold-plated “low-oxygen copper” hi-fi interconnects.

24May03 — 0

Being John Tourist

I spent yesterday wandering around Cambridge with Chris and his equally funny and fun girlfriend Lynn. I bought overpriced fudge from the fudge shop, took photographs of them in front of great lumps of English heritage and we browsed antiques. We had a bostin’ time.

They also nudged me into a CD fair where I picked up a fine overlooked album by The Power Station, called Living in Fear, for only a fiver. (Yeah, I know, it’s £3.99 at Amazon.) It was released after the death of band member Bernard Edwards, top bassist and producer.

23May03 — 0

Un-sophist-icated

Yesterday evening an attractive, smart woman took me out for dinner. Then we went to see The Matrix: Reloaded. I came home and stayed up until 1:30am…
…listening to a documentary on the World Service about the current state of Afghanistan (or, as the BBC have it on their Website summary of the programme, “Afghansitan“).

The upshot of the broadcast: Kabul is a hell of a lot better than it used to be; the rest of the country is in a variety of different kinds of mess. One English aid worker, dodging bandits out in the provinces, stated without irony on air that “at least there was security under the Taliban”. (Apropos of nothing, I found out this week that, whatever the popular myth, the Nazis didn’t even run the trains on time.)

“But what about the movie, you middle-aged git?”

At The Guardian Molly Haskell laments the early arrival of the summer season at the cinema—her irony free comment:

When did summer become a dirty word to those of us who love movies? When did critical consensus become totally irrelevant or, worse, a consumer guide: bad reviews = good box office?

The answer to the hilarious middle question is: “When you supposed arbiters of taste disappeared up your own arses enthusing about sentimental nonsense like Cinema Paradiso or sub-Mills-and-Boon twaddle like The Piano, simply because it wasn’t American sentimental nonsense or Hollywood twaddle. Or perhaps it was when you misdirected superlatives at the hauntingly average American Beauty, simply because it took the cheapest, tiredest shots at (mythical) life in the American suburbs.” Yes, people watch shit at the movies, but at least it isn’t pre-approved, metropolitan in-crowd shit.

Peter Bradshaw raves about Trinity:

This movie certainly reveals who the real Matrix star is: Carrie-Anne Moss. Trinity is a magnificent creation, swooping and curling through the air in black liquefaction. She jabs and stings like a jellyfish, devastatingly sexy in a weirdly heterodox way and of course only naturally erotic in combat. Did the Wachowskis subliminally suggest, in their title, the word dominatrix? … Moss’s face is light years away from the Tara Reid babe template for Hollywood stars. The sharp nose, the pale scholar’s brow, the jet-black hair slicked away from the face by gel and martial sweat – and the overwhelming impression of intelligence – make Moss the biggest star of the screen.

. Barbara Ellen at The Times raves about Morpheus:

Fishburne is the true star of the Matrix franchise, and at least he puts a bit of effort in. Reeves, bless him, underplays to the point where you feel like holding a glass in front of his mouth to check that he’s still breathing..

Is it an accident that the author for the former review is male and the author of the latter female?

I’ve not linked to the full reviews I quoted because I’d you hate you to have any aspect of the story spoiled for you by a sneering middle-class bore who thinks that knowing the plot is important to the enjoyment of Art. Without giving anything away, all I can say is that the film is funnier, more obviously expensive, and less satisfying than the original, but you’ll go to see it anyway.

By the way, if you’re reading, Judith, you might be interested in this, also from the arts section of The Guardian.

21May03 — 0

Phew

I’ve been too tied up with computer problems this past couple of nights to post anything to the ‘Blog. How did I fix them? Well, non-geeks might as well stop reading this entry now.

I fried the Windows partition table on my Win98 drive. Running PartitionMagic 4.0 under DOS I was told to follow the advice on page 126 of the manual. The advice?:

“You’re f**ked, mate. Reformat your harddisk and re-install Windows.”

For this I paid £30 (admittedly several years ago).

Then I switched to my Linux partition, did a Google search, downloaded, compiled and installed the truly magical gpart and Robert was indeed my father’s brother. For this I paid exactly nothing.

Free software: worth more than software you pay for…

18May03 — 0

The Eternal Optimism of the Israelis

One of the frustrations of a ‘Blog is that there are stories that you know all your friends would love, but you can’t tell properly because someone else involved in the actual events might Google for it ten years hence and object violently.

So let’s just say I know of a person with a serious psychological problem who was apprehended on his way to (he believed) solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was convinced that someone would frustrate his mission and was therefore in possession of offensive weapons. Although his intentions were good, given the security he was about to encounter and his absolute honesty, this approach was spectacularly foolhardy. Only a person who had, say, omitted to take essential medication would have been this silly.

I related the story over the phone to a friend in Israel—and it’s a hell of a lot funnier if you know the details—and her reaction actually made me laugh more than the farcical events I had described: “I wonder what his peace plan was?”…

After a little thought this question didn’t seem so pathetically hopeful. Whatever the idea was, it couldn’t have been any more crazy in its optimism than this one.

17May03 — 2

English Food

It’s Friday night. I’m standing outside a restaurant with two Italians and a Mexican. (No, this isn’t a joke.) Another Mexican is yet to arrive. We are in King’s Parade, the most touristy of touristy locations in the touristy town of Cambridge. Across from us is one of the most photographed buildings in the World, King’s College Chapel.

They are not looking at it. They are looking at me as I stand in front of the mural of Henry VIII in the restaurant’s upstairs entrance, waving my hands. I am trying to persuade them that they are taking a huge risk by entering a restaurant that prides itself on its Englishness. I plead in vain; the Latin lambs enter the Anglo-Saxon lion’s den.

The decor is stylish, the staff are cosmopolitan, the food is… English: steak and kidney pie, braised lamb, fish and chips. I opt for the last. (They did have other wild delicacies like “bruschetta”.) Surely they can’t screw fish and chips up?

They can. They did. I chewed on some not-entirely-stale fish encased in what was intended to be batter, but had the texture and taste of a new form of aerated industrial packing material, so greasy it could only have been a by-product of the production of diesel fuel. The chips were fried to within a millimetre of total carbonization.

Admittedly, the others didn’t seem too disappointed with their choices, even though the Englishness of the place extended to confused service and the random unavailability of items from the menu. Perhaps they found it all exotic…

Anyway, you now know enough about the venue to avoid making the same mistake yourselves…

15May03 — 0

How Could It Come To This?

Do you remember the Cold War when people would talk about how things behind the Iron Curtain were nothing like as bad as the Americans said they were? Then the Curtain fell away and it turned out things were much worse.

(After this revelation most of the Marxists on this side folded up their tables and went home—just when they could finally have done something useful and helped to stop crazed Friedman fanboy “advisers” from the West do their best to actually make things worse than they were under the collapsing communist regimes.)

I yield to few in my (political) hatred of Margaret Thatcher, one of Friedman’s acolytes, yet today I find myself in the painful position of agreeing with every quote from a speech she made “against doctor’s orders” in New York yesterday. (The report is from The Times and my attention was drawn to it by Andrew Sullivan’s ‘Blog.)

Perhaps it was the stress of having to give my seminar to the rest of the HGMP-RC today a month earlier than I had planned?

Perhaps the Devil has finally come to collect my soul?

Middle age?

Oh, forgive me, forgive me…

13May03 — 0

Leering

This evening, driving home in the Spring sunshine from a seminar at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology I had the rare pleasure of leaning out of the window of the car and shouting “Awight, gorgeous?” at an attractive young woman and having her respond by waving at me and smiling.

She was, of course, someone I know (not in a Biblical way, mind). She txted me later to say that she had been primed to reply with serious verbal abuse until she saw who it was. The males watching the scene from the Mill Road, looking at me, and thinking “wanker” were just dressing on the sandwich of every Guardian-reading man’s politically incorrect fantasy.

13May03 — 0

Saint George

John Reid had the unenviable job of answering questions about the resignation of Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, this morning on the Today Programme. He put in a solid performance despite interviewer John Humphrys‘ “sophistry”. The accusation was accurate.

Of course, Reid’s job would have been easier if he had not been forced to defend the whole “Weapons of Mass Destruction” justification for going to war in Iraq. I have never bothered with any of that cobblers myself, but I didn’t have to justify my support for war to the World’s guardians of peace, international law, and human life, countries like China, France and the Russian Federation.

My not talking about Weapons of Mass Destruction annoys my anti-war friends intensely. There was a legal case for the war, but I could care less, and I pissed off so-called peace-lovers even more by sticking simply to the absolute moral question.

The war’s been over for weeks. The Americans and British should have restored electricity, fresh water, sanitation and every last artifact to its cabinet by now. But most importantly where are those Weapons of Mass Destruction they said threatened London? Without them, surely you’ve got to wonder why we did it?

Anyway, over to Lindsey German, organiser of the UK Stop The War campaign:

“I think that the best thing we could do to back our troops up, is to bring them home. They’ve got no right to be in Iraq.
They are doing no good and it’s absolutely clear now that the local population feel a lot of animosity towards them.”

. Well, what right have we to interfere in peaceful discussions between the various interested local parties over the future of Iraq? They’re grown-ups; I’m sure they can come to some kind of amicable arrangment…

Anyway, if you agree with her, you can pop over to their Website, download and sign their “Defend George Galloway Petition“.

I certainly do agree with them that:

“The attack on George Galloway is a general attack on the biggest anti war movement that this country has ever seen…”

11May03 — 0

Spring Clean

If you have a moment, hop over to loveandbentspoons.com where I've tarted up my photo gallery front page and added more captions to the photos themselves. Please let me know of any bugs or mistakes you find.

I really will put up my sister‘s wedding photos soon. Honestly.

10May03 — 0

Or Maybe Banking…

When I was having dinner with Adrienne and Blaise and their friends a few days ago, A&B were teasing me that I was actually Jewish. Blaise really is Jewish; Adrienne just studied physics at The Weizmann 😉 .

Yesterday I was reading an interview with James Watson, who used to be the director of The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Coincidentally, this is where A&B met. He was asked who he would cast today to play him instead of Jeff Goldblum if they remade [The Race for] The Double Helix for HBO. [This “docu-movie” was released as Life Story in the UK.] He suggested Ben Stiller, though he admitted that he had been puzzled with the original casting of Jeff Goldblum:

“…all my friends were Jewish… …I’m the only non-Jew, and they cast Jeff Goldblum. But then I realized, I’m culturally Jewish. My mother never believed in the New Testament…”

So at least I have one thing in common with a bona fide scientific genius. Whenever my mum reads the Bible it's the Psalms. Does this mean I am culturally a Jewish singer? Perhaps it’s my destiny to form a Neil Diamond tribute band?… And what about my Arab friends (and family)?… Am I just culturally a pro-Semite?

Anyway, when they do Tonight, Matthew, I’m Going To Be Neil Diamond: The Damian Counsell Story, it’s going to have to be Vin.

(The institute where I work is about to be renamed after Rosalind Franklin, another of the central characters in the DNA story. And Rosalind Franklin really was Jewish.)

07May03 — 3

Déjà Not Vu

A quiet morning on Radio 4’s Today Programme so there’s time for an item about the evolution of the eye (Oxford physiologist’s grand theory about species expansion undermined on air by Cambridge biologist pointing out that the former has his dates wrong), time for an interview with a slippery Sinn Fein representative (refusing to answer simple questions from James Naughtie about refusing to answer simple questions from the UK government), and time for one of those reports from a Far Off Poor Country Where Bad Things Are Happening.

Where better for the last than the amusingly named Democratic Republic of Congo? There, UN “peacekeepers” can’t even protect the base of their own humanitarian mission from looters. What unoriginal excuse do they offer for their failure even in this simple task? Insufficient troops. You can bet no one on TV is going to be putting on a concerned voice and demanding explanations about that story…

05May03 — 0

Edgy

Bryan Singer has been responsible for some of the best opening sequences of films I have ever seen, in The Usual Suspects, The X-Men, and now The X-Men 2.

Unlike the first in this series, which declined steeply from a beautifully directed and affecting first few minutes to a camp-a-thon between stagey Brit lead actors, the latest X-Men movie gripped me all the way through. At the risk of sounding like a movie nerd, in this one the special effects were set alongside arresting conventional cinematographic techniques and built on a sound and witty script. Writing a comic book screenplay for an ensemble cast must have been an absolute pig. This one was roasted to a turn.

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