March 2004

Budgeting

It’s Budget day in the UK. Gordon Brown has produced a boring budget with one absolutely brilliant strategic move: he promised to reduce the number of civil servants by 40 000 and move 20 000 of the remainder out of London to the provinces. As an employee of the Medical Research Council there’s every chance I might […]

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They’ll Kill Us Anyway

Even the BBC man described the shift in the Spanish vote as being “a disturbing development” in European democracy this morning. Then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw put in a clumsy performance when he was interviewed about those same elections by John Humphrys. I wish Radio 4 had interviewed Mark Steyn instead. We’re on the plane. […]

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Forty-Seven!?

Cricket doesn’t often feature here, but this is too strange a result to ignore. What are the Windies smoking? (It was pretty tough choosing the freakiest sports story to feature here, on a weekend when Villa won 0-4 away and Man U lost 4-1 to Man City.)

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Cohen Does It Again

As I always write: Nick Cohen is Left wing; I frequently disagree with him; his journalism is often superb. In today’s Observer he defends human rights against the “War on Terrorism” crowd, attacks poor little rich boy terrorists and worries about the dangers of anti-Muslim racism. Nothing has been sillier in the past few years […]

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Bang To Rights

I see Amber’s unbelievable Texan miscarriage of justice story and I raise with a British one. WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit? An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the […]

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Falling Pregnant

Teenage pregnancy rates in Britain continue at more-or-less the same depressingly high level they’ve been at since the 70s. The BBC covers the question of why. Whenever there’s a debate about this you get the usual answers: on the Left concerned types talk about how more sex education is needed; on the Right concerned types […]

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Blue Murder

According to Oxford Today, BBC Oxford has produced a popular online murder mystery game, introduced by Colin Dexter. One piece of advice I have read: don’t view the last clue until you’re sure whodunnit. I don’t know the answer myself, but I suspect it would also be wise to cover up the public poll results […]

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Make a Joyful Noise

One of Claire‘s friends sent this one. It’s pretty childish I know, but anyone even vaguely familiar with the language of pornography will find it hard to stifle a snigger at this real parish Website. It reminds me of the days when the girls of Philadelphia’s Beaver College [since renamed for some reason] would visit […]

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Harsh

Yesterday Amber sent me a New York Times article about the latest development in a shocking story from Texas that she’s been following for quite some time: 46 people, almost all of them black, were arrested on fabricated drug charges in Tulia, Tex., their ordeal will draw to a close today with the announcement of […]

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Meep Meep

I was supposed to be out with a bunch of Genome Campus types, but, thanks the relaxed mores of the youth of today, I was only txted the co-ordinates of the rendezvous point when I had given up on the party and was wandering around Tesco’s, looking for the Parmesan. I’m now ‘Blogging as I […]

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Neighbours (again)

The latest on Johann Hari’s Website is a sad tale of a Palestinian schoolteacher who has Israeli soldiers occupying the upstairs part of his home. “I will never lose my optimism,” Khalil said the last time I saw him. “There are people on both sides who want peace. The real battle is not between Israel […]

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Wakka Wakka

I hate slapstick. John Sessions once described it as “people being very stupid, very slowly, over and over again.” As I watched the trailer for the new feature-length Starsky and Hutch and a succession of surreal pratfalls flickered past, my desire to see the film itself slowly seeped away. Then I came to the end […]

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Toxic

In Britain, two small blonde women from the colonies imitate pole dancers in a fight to sell the most CDs to impressionable children in a week.

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It’s the Christianity, Stupid

Yesterday Claire sent me a link to Christopher Hitchens’ recent piece about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. My thanks to Claire. I’d already read this article, and the one that it in turn refers to, about whether or not the Jews killed Christ; but I reread them and thought about the questions they […]

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Aagh!

Usually I have to ‘Blog hurriedly in between other stuff. Today I’ve been at home pretty much all day so I’ve had plenty of time to post things properly to PooterGeek. My ineptitude has expanded to fill the time available to it. Somehow, every time I wander over to my keyboard to do so, I […]

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Revealed: The Hell of Captivity

Leading Right-wing pro-war daily The Guardian exposes the shocking truth: He spent a typical day watching movies, going to class and playing football. He was fascinated to learn about the solar system, and now enjoys reciting the names of the planets, starting with Earth. Less diverting were the twice-monthly interrogations about his knowledge of al-Qaida […]

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Talking of Fairy Stories

In today’s Observer there is a report on Disney pinning some hope of recovery on hugely expensive productions of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. The correct versions of my last two posts are now up. The content isn’t hugely different, but they are now easier to read and make slightly more sense than the ones […]

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Kerry Backer

Gene is a hawkish Lefty and a frequent poster of pro-Israeli comment at pro-war Labour/Marxist ‘Blog “Harry’s Place”. Yesterday he defended US Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry there over the issue of “defense”.

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