November 2003

By the Power of Wiqqi!

A couple of weeks back—prompted by workmates Gayle, Martin and Adam—I sent an email to everyone I knew on Campus, drawing their attention to the interesting motivations of the people sponsoring Operation Christmas Child, a charitable effort to distribute gift parcels to disadvantaged kids around the World being promoted to the staff of our vast, […]

Read More

Still In One Piece

So, for the first time in two years of “working at Cambridge” I’m in town today, teaching in the Genetics Department and Al-Qa-bloody-e-da (or perhaps two bored students) threaten the town and the University with a couple of bombs for lunchtime. It was one of my students who alerted me to the threat first, but […]

Read More

Oh, Michael!

Because of the hitches earlier I wasn’t able to post a magically unfortunate Michael Jackson headline. ITV have, er, pulled it, but the traces still remain in Google’s cache if you hurry. UPDATE: It’s now gone from ITV, but good old Channel 4, er, comes to the rescue.

Read More

Speechification

It goes a bit like this: Americans are fat people with hunting rifles in enormous cars. They are led by a rich idiot cowboy who would rather drive his gas-guzzling cavalcade over the supine bodies of his country’s underclass than sign binding agreements with other peace-loving nations. They make vulgar films, which they force upon […]

Read More

Movie Review Round-Up

I thought Hollywood Homicide wasn’t bad; Judith and Arnon thought it was bad. Leasey, Jo, Mark, Sonya and I thought Finding Nemo was good. Judith and Arnon also thought Down With Love was very bad. I thought American Pie wasn’t anything like as bad as I expected; and, surprisingly, (film buff) Terry thought it was […]

Read More

You All Live In A Convict Colony

I know as much about rugby union football as I do about crochet, so it was wise of me to listen to the World Cup final on the radio today and have the play described and explained to me. If I’m so ignorant of the game, why did I care enough to tune in? For […]

Read More

His Art Goes On

Ye gods: another late night in the lab. Now I am finally home I should share with you my one Web catch of the day. Alan Gilbert is a professional photographer in Baltimore who takes excellent photographs of very boring things. One of the oddest in his portfolio is an image of a model train […]

Read More

Up For It

Whizzed down to Imperial yesterday evening to see the author of this book lecture on The Evolution of Female Promiscuity. The talk was clear, thoroughly prepared and elegantly constructed, if a little over-performed. While she insisted on drawing attention to some of her clunkier jokes, some of the funniest remarks Dr Judson made were those […]

Read More

Stiff Upper Lips

Maoi wrote looking for insights into the English lack of ease with affection. It’s unfortunate that she has (like many of my international friends) mainly been exposed to the spawn of the English upper-middle classes. To get a better handle on these types I recommend that she watches this film and this film back to […]

Read More

Stupid

Mark Albertella sends a link to a site I can’t believe I’ve overlooked until now. Where else can you buy a Sigmund Freud action figure and walking sushi? (Warning: the site is ugly as well as stupid.)

Read More

What’s Your Daemon?

Philip Pullman seems to be everywhere these days. I’ve even just had a conversation with my landlord about him. Leasey (who has just finished reading Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy) pointed out that this interview is worth reading.

Read More

The Road Less Taken

What with the Roadmap being such a roaring success and all it seems a bit cheeky of me to pass on Judith‘s recommendation that we should all have a good look at the Geneva Accord, because, well, to my eyes it’s not completely crazy at least.

Read More

Cheese And The Eating Thereof

One of the topics of conversation at dinner with Bill and Judy was the provenance of the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. I made two claims about it that were wrong. First, it came to prominence during the “diplomatic” row about Iraq not because it was used by a member of the US administration (as I […]

Read More

Thanks For All The Fish

Over to Bill and Judy’s yesterday evening for an excellent dinner and debate with the sabbaticalling professor and his wife, whom the immigration authorities would have chained in the kitchen rather than let her steal paid work from the British. Amongst other working activities, Bill has been known to wrestle with a program called Lutefisk. […]

Read More

Cream Crackered

Home at quarter to one in the morning to a dinner of Ritz biscuits. Anyone would think I was over-worked. Sorry for the lack of ‘Blogging. Leasey has promised us exploding penguins tomorrow. I mean today.

Read More

German Intelligence vs. The Irish

There was an excellent spoof play on the strange comedy show Radio Nine, earlier this week. In it, a bunch of actors put on period Irish accents to do an historical drama “glorifying organized crime”—a tiny, sharp pin in the romantic bubble of Republican myth (and I’m supposed to be a Catholic). Ignore the misleading […]

Read More

Stealing Cake To Eat The Moon

A scientist friend who wishes to remain anonymous (do you have a naughty lab head by any chance?) tipped me off to two stories about plagiarism in Nature. This brief summary on SciDev.Net has links to the original stories in the journal.

Read More

Democracy In Noisy Action

Things go wrong with democracy all the time, but at least there’s some hope that they can be fixed. Here’s the latest from The Philippines and India. Some other systems, however, are just broken. I understand we tried feudalism here for a while ourselves, but you need a lot of oil to make an inherently […]

Read More

A Good Politician

Yesterday I joined Sonya at the home of Mr R, the father of one of Sonya’s life-long friends, for morning coffee. He used to work as a barrister in the House of Lords. I had to leave after about an hour (an hour enlivened by his excellent stories) to run down the road and take […]

Read More

Starting Them Young

I try to avoid ‘Blogging ‘Blogs, but Claire will love this one. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid future accusations of a lack of foresight, the CIA has a kids’ Website. (I picked this up via Mike Daisey’s ‘Blog.)

Read More
Older Posts