June 2003

Skin Flicks

Vail Reese is a dermatologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite being horribly designed, Skinema, his online collection of celebrity skin problems, has been a huge Web attraction for years. It was only recently (in the wake of the “vampire twins” controversy) that I stumbled upon Dermatrix, his special feature about the dermatological conditions […]

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Good News

Not only was my beautiful niece (and now Goddaughter) christened today in the brilliant summer sunshine (thank you, Clare and Steve for a lovely day), but this has happened too. I have been pretty skeptical about the “Roadmap”, but I predicted this development in the peace process at a dinner party at Jude‘s before the […]

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To The Point

Training Day and About Schmidt are excellent films. Rent them. Surprisingly, in Training Day, Denzel Washington doesn’t play Denzel Washington and, in About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson doesn’t play Jack Nicholson. The Academy was impressed by both performances—and Denzel and Jack didn’t even have to act from wheelchairs.

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Boo!

[I take no responsibility for any lunches lost following the following link.] If they could stop all those Jews and orientals and blacks and Arabs from polluting the gene pool, perhaps neo-Nazis could finally attain absolute racial purity.

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Amen

Here’s my favourite quote of the day, fresh from the Quote Monster: As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life—so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls. M. Cartmill It’s also like becoming […]

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Not So Bright

Next week I am going to stand up in front of a church full of witnesses, renounce the Devil and promise to bring up my niece as a God-fearing Catholic girl. And I like to think that I am a bright. As Dickie Dawkins writes it sounds better than "grouchy skeptical bastard".

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Hometown Hell

I grew up in a miserable, violent, bigoted dump called Tamworth. Knowhere was originally an online community for skateboarders with information about places for boarders to hang out across the country. Now anyone can use the site to comment on any aspect of local life across the UK. Appropriately The pages about Tamworth are full […]

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Landing in London

It’s hotter than southern California, but the grotty toilets are enough to reassure me that I really am back in Britain. A curiosity of two-leg flights is that you keep your seat while the identity of your neighbour changes. From LA to New York it was a woman who organizes promotional events for HBO; from […]

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U! S! A! U! S! A!

It’s the Sunday afternoon “Support Our Troops” demonstration on the corner, near the Warner shopping park in Canoga Park, Californ-I-A. As usual I have my camera and I am hoping for some pics of the demonstrators. On the opposite side of the junction (five lanes away, of course) there are two anti-war protestors, a man […]

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Haben Sie Angst?

Appropriate that I should be sitting in a Californian Internet café with Rammstein banging out of the sound system (“Ich will die Ruhe stören!“), as I point you at the “Pavement Terror Web page. Some years ago, an evil photographer drove around a British town scaring the bejesus out of random passers-by and capturing the […]

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Men In Black

Universal City, Los Angeles, California: I am in the lobby of the Universal City Hilton, wandering around looking for its seafood restaurant. As usual, I am dressed in black, albeit with a blue T-shirt on underneath my black cardigan. Yes, I am wearing a cardigan; it is the middle of what the local news stations […]

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Gaze With Awe Upon My Works

Remember this experiment in search-engine-ology? PooterGeek is already 6th highest Google hit on the entire planet for the phrase “naked Harry Potter” and for the phrase “Charlotte Church nude“. The first hit recorded hit in the logs from someone searching for “Charlotte Church nude” was last weekend—could have been a PooterGeek reader, though.

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A Real Saint

Unlike most of the anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-trade, anti-science wool-heads who clutter our Leftish press these days with their inane polemics, Bob Geldof manages to combine a passion for improving life in Africa with the complete absence of ideology. He also does something real about his passion. In comparison with Geldof, the Naomi Kleins, George Monbiots […]

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“It doesn’t matter what I believe.”*

You’ve got to hand it to the Wachowski brothers, they know how to maximise their franchise. Leasy kindly lent me her copy of The Animatrix so that I could enjoy the latest offshoot of the original Matrix movie without lining the Wachowskis’ pockets further. (So far I’ve paid to watch The Matrix itself in New […]

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Well Done, Fi!

Congratulations to Fiona Hood (second from left in this picture), the woman who named this ‘Blog, on getting a First! Viv, Neil and I have already ordered the spicy potatoes for your next outing with the Mill Road Massive.

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Young Minds

This made me laugh out loud. There was a debate on the geek news site Slashdot earlier this week about ageism in information technology hiring. “Gen X-ers“, like me, are reaching their 30s and people don’t want to take them on as programmers, preferring “younger minds” instead. One thoughtful and informed comment on this was […]

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Pet Presidency

Are you a patriotic American? Do you want to express your love for your country in a material way? Do you find the idea of flying the Stars-and-Stripes a little dull? Try this site. Hands off the “Socks the Cat Wristwatch“. It’s mine.

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Do You Feel Unhappy?

Today one of my virtual colleagues linked to an article reporting on a study suggesting that computer use was not a direct cause of carpal tunnel syndrome. At the same site I couldn’t help noticing the link to a D-I-Y online test for depression. The test is hilariously obvious, so much so that it reminded […]

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Gun—sorry—Geek For Hire

No blogging this weekend because I’ve been slowly constructing the PooterGeek archive and working on a new version of Claire’s Web pages [currently broken: not my fault, honest] for her book Loose Lips. [Have I mentioned it enough times, now?] Yesterday evening, it briefly reached about 1400 in the amazon.com bestseller chart. It can go […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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.

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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.

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