Friends of the PooterGeek might be interested in more photos from Paris. The rest of you will probably want to skip the boring pictures of buildings… … and look at Eitan being cute… …or Claire and Judith being cute…
Read More20Jun04 — 0
June 2004
20Jun04 — 6
Oi, Dave, No!
Last week, Backword Dave sneered at Eve Garrard's cool, analytical dismantling of Amnesty's recent pronouncements about the Iraq “war”: “I gather Ms Garrard is not a regular blogger, so she may be excused understanding of the ground rules, but if you want to say that something is 'no part of Amnesty's remit,' a link is […]
Read More20Jun04 — 0
“English” ethnicities
I should explain my last 'Blog entry for American readers. In the UK, “Asian” is generally taken to mean South Asian, coming from the Indian subcontinent—for example Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi—so I had to use “Oriental” to refer to my being mistaken for Singaporean or Chinese, say. “Far Eastern” tends to be used to describe […]
Read More19Jun04 — 4
“You Don't Look British”
Sorry for the thin 'Blogging; I'm still moving the furniture around in here, though I did take a break earlier this evening to visit our local cheap-and-cheerful Chinese restaurant. I have just paid in advance at the counter. The girl behind it looks at me quizzically. I smile. “Are you British?” she asks. “Yes, I […]
Read More16Jun04 — 0
Jailbait
Our Man in Washington sends this story [may require registration with the Washington Post's database of child sex offenders, can help in weight reduction only as part of a calorie controlled diet]. PooterGeek is most famous for its “Naked Harry Potter” page, where posters purporting to be minors demand sexually explicit images of the juvenile […]
Read More15Jun04 — 6
The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores
Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet, Boy George of Culture Club, Kim Wilde of, er, Kim Wilde; the list is far longer than it should be, but the the top of the roll of annoying 80s has-beens competing for a timeshare on another fifteen minutes is the neck-snappingly overrated Morrissey [helpful of them to name his […]
Read More14Jun04 — 1
Wixon-mania
Yesterday evening my officemate Jo and her fiancé kindly shared their home, food and television with me for the England cock-up. I have mentioned my officemate Jo's brother Paul before. He is a bit of a “character” as we English say, though he himself is married to a foreigner (Japanese) with whom he has produced […]
Read More13Jun04 — 0
Serial Liars See Light?
How I'm going to miss them. The “Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq” and their completely misleading Cambridge University crest are to morph into “Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq”. It's about fifteen years too late for most of the dead, guys. You're in good company: that was Rumsfeld's problem too. Never mind, nice to have you along […]
Read More13Jun04 — 0
A Break From The Norm
That Norm and the other denizens of TypePad disappeared for a while yesterday, but we still had this Norm to entertain us. [You might have to lower the resolution of your screen to make its tiny text readable.]
Read More13Jun04 — 0
Soup Dragon Rears Head
By way of apology to Backword Dave, maybe there is some empirical evidence of Bush's economic failure. It just doesn't affect the numbers—or, indeed, the people—anyone cares about.
Read More13Jun04 — 0
Homes Of Multiple Occupation
One PooterGeek regular might be interested in this organization. Do you think they deal with very, very close neighbours?
Read More13Jun04 — 0
Get Out. Get Ahead.
Thomas Friedman has some advice for the Israelis today. PooterGeek's Israel correspondent's on it. [May require free registration with the New York Times; contains small moving fonts; not suitable for dyslexics.]
Read More13Jun04 — 0
I Am Spartacus
In the age of Google it is so important to name your children wisely. I am grateful that my parents christened me as they did. Imagine you are Michael Henson, Professor of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, respected for your work on bioreactors. A fellow academic goes looking for you and stumbles […]
Read More12Jun04 — 1
Grated To Death
A US correspondent writes to ask just how badly Labour did in the council elections on Thursday. For tactical reasons (ha ha ha) I have been forbidden until now to share with PooterGeekers just how terribly the election campaign has been going. Now that I can, the thesaurus on my desk is not helping. I'll […]
Read More12Jun04 — 0
So Mad It's Good
You will never believe who owns the “jihad.net” domain. A bunch of obviously talented and intelligent people—refugees from the newsgroup “alt.dinosaur.barney.die.die.die”—have constructed a vast fantasy universe around the idea that Barney the Dinosaur is not a boring but harmless children's television character; he is, in truth, “the demon B'harne”, a threat to all mankind who […]
Read More10Jun04 — 2
Sympathy For The Devil
Imagine you are Satan, Father of Lies, the Tempter, the Old Gentleman, the Archfiend. You are planning your biggest head-to-head with your former employer, the Almighty, since that discussion on the clifftop with ol' JC. You aim to bring the whole breadth of humanity to the edge of Armageddon. To marshall your demonic hordes in […]
Read More10Jun04 — 0
Losing Hearts And Minds
Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, makes some important points about the US Justice Department's torture memos, bits of paper which are, in a way, more shocking than photos of piles of naked Iraqi prisoners. It's not a bad piece until Cohen resorts to the cliché “winning hearts and minds”, then your toes will clench […]
Read More10Jun04 — 0
Grr
I couldn't access PooterGeek, counsell.com etc. last night or this morning, and neither could a bunch of other people, I suspect—no email access either. There are about half-a-dozen things I want to post, but I'll be busy the rest of today, hence this lunchtime message. Come back later.
Read More09Jun04 — 0
Help PooterGeek Remould The Fabric Of Reality
While asking after my baby pics yesterday evening, my token Palestinian friend* Hind commented in her unique style, “We all think you love children, really. Why don't you have some?” I mumbled something about how ordering a baby from the Internet in the absence of at least adding a wife to my Amazon wishlist might […]
Read More08Jun04 — 0
Go Girl!
Anti-war academic hair-splitters desperately using the separated fibres to lash together a defence for Amnesty International, mess with Eve Garrard at your peril. (I'm just amazed she has the patience to pick apart such flimsy constructions. She may be a respected scholar, but she'd probably also do a good job helping the elderly and confused […]
Read More08Jun04 — 0
The Female Started It
In the days before 'Bloggers, the traditional sad, no-lifes were birdwatchers. Here, one man (I'm just betting it's a man, but you're not going to bet against me, are you?) combines “twitching” and the Web to tell us about the Sparrows kleptoparasitising the Starlings.
Read More08Jun04 — 0
Quick Round-Up Of Oldies
Here's one for the pharmacologically minded readers (Anthony “Black Triangle” Cox and little Leasey) about “pharmazooticals“. Next, testimony for those who really want to hear it from the intern's mouth—remember this story? Thirdly, one of the most detested (by the Right) papers of the liberal Left takes some well-deserved shots at the huge target that […]
Read More08Jun04 — 1
Rave and Rant
Judith tried to post a comment nominating Victor Davis Hanson as a rival to Mark Steyn for the Best Columnist Working In The English Language award, but the currently flaky PooterGeek site rejected her submission, so I'm posting it here. She recommended this piece by VDH. Funnily enough, “Backword Dave“, who links to me occasionally […]
Read More08Jun04 — 0
Perhaps They're Already There
Further to my flip' suggestion to the Arabians, Tim Blair quotes a supposed eye-witness report.
Read More07Jun04 — 2
The Special Relationship
Americans and British give French the finger: pictures at eleven.
Read More07Jun04 — 0
'Lo / Goodbye
Rich, famous, bored? Why not get married again? Jennifer Lopez is 34 and she's on her third. I'm 36 and still wake up in a cold sweat from wedding nightmares—and I thought that was a Catholic thing. Her latest husband is on his second (the first was Miss Universe). You can get 3-1 that this […]
Read More06Jun04 — 2
Nutter
What possesses someone to spend months building their own tank, climb in, armed to the teeth, smash up a couple of buildings with it, and then kill himself? At least no one else died. If only the poor guy had started a 'Blog, he could have worked all that anger out in a harmless, creative […]
Read More06Jun04 — 1
Toodle Gip
Ronald Reagan was responsible for some spectacularly nasty things. He was also (as I have noted here before) hugely misrepresented by the media. Mark Steyn glosses over Reagan's nastiness, but makes clear that the real guilty, back in the days of my youth, were those who glossed over the evil of Reagan's, and our, enemies. […]
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