George W. Bush: one group of proud Americans can at last reveal the truth about his record.
Read MoreAugust 2004
The Rules
Concentrate hard as you approach the last of the nine risk factors claimed to account for 90 percent of all heart attacks. It’s as if someone had stood up at a meeting of Bible scholars and proposed that the lost eleventh commandment was “Thou shalt get thine round in.” Two pints and a box of […]
Read MoreFunny Ha Ha
[UPDATE: I’ve been told that the following collection of gags originally appeared in a letter to The Independent. This explains why I haven’t seen it before 😉 .] Steve K is back at God Save The Queen. He has some serious reflections on serious things he saw at the Edinburgh Festival. Meanwhile, here at PooterGeek, […]
Read MoreHis Wife Doesn’t Understand Him
Mister: “I fear I must leave you now, my love, and do what I can to help my newly-liberated countrymen and women.” Missus: “You bastard.”
Read MoreCults
There were two other things I enjoyed reading in the edition of The Independent‘s “Review” that I mention below: Andy Gill’s record reviews, of course—he has this anachronistic tendency to write about the music itself and listen to black artists (without making excuses for them)—and a review of yet another book by a middle-class mother […]
Read MoreCharlotte Jones Is Everywhere
When I was about 16, Charlotte Jones, now a playwright, beat me in the final of a public speaking competition. Because we were released from the green room to compete one-at-a-time, I didn’t meet her in person until a couple years later when we wound up undergraduates at the same college. We then spent far […]
Read MoreThe Decline And Fall of British Popular Music: Part XXXVII
Nick Barlow at What You Can Get Away With links to this piece by Sandy Hunter about errors made by the judges in that international gathering of peaceful competition, the World Air Guitar Championships (“If you are holding an air guitar you cannot hold a rifle”). Nick Barlow asks, why no air drums? Sandy Hunter […]
Read MoreMark Thatcher: A View From The Right
[Eric the Unread draws our attention to one way that evidence might have been gathered against Mark Thatcher.] A commenter at PooterGeek suggested that my assessment of Mark Thatcher’s contribution to civilization to date might be biased by my instinctive antipathy towards the Thatcher family. For the sake of balance I have collected some opinions […]
Read MoreHumphrys. Again.
The man is such an easy target that sometimes I wonder why I bother. This is, after all, someone who unselfconsciously assembled an article complaining about bad writing from a collage of clichés. Then I hear him on the radio and I have to take another swipe. This weekend Humphrys was slagging off television today, […]
Read MoreThanks, Dad
As the World’s feeblest Aston Villa supporter it’s always some kind of comfort that my dad’s football team—although it also has an illustrious history—somehow manages to do consistently worse. Admittedly, given the relative smallness of the hometown population, Preston North End have more of an excuse for being footballing under-achievers.
Read MoreCongratulations!
Love and Bent Spoons to Auriol on her engagement! [Auriol is a cousin of fellow ‘Bloggers Chris Brooke and Michael Brooke.]
Read MoreNot An ‘Appy One
Squander Two has introduced me to The Policeman’s Blog. It’s the badger’s nadgers: brightly-written, entertaining accounts of life dealing with the criminal underclass. The Policeman’s struggles against people determined to take ruthless advantage of every kindness shown to them by the system remind me of the prison hospital tales of Theodore Dalrymple, aka Dr Anthony […]
Read MoreFahrenheit 2000
Inevitably I’m late to this, but here [via Slashdot] is the list of books Americans most often want to ban from their libraries. Nice to see Huck Finn still hanging in there in the nineties.
Read MoreThe Day Draws Closer
Well, it’s a start.
Read MoreOh, Please
The BBC interviews the woman who made Britain’s silver-medal-winning boxer’s gumshield.
Read MoreMake Your Own Entertainment!
Right. My sister‘s coming to stay with me today, so you lot can spend the weekend reading other ‘Blogs or dead trees or just talking amongst yourselves. How about this? “The so-called ‘Iron Lady’ of the international stage, Margaret Thatcher was, for the most part, a pragmatist in domestic matters, who disguised the timidity of […]
Read MoreTwo For The Price Of One
Today’s book from Libra Aries is Gregory Szanto’s Astrotherapy: Astrology and the Realisation of the Self. It promises to combine “the ancient art of astrology” with the “the modern science of psychotherapy”.
Read MoreNew Labour Update
This week I have had three emails from the Labour party. The first two asked me to be a candidate (again), this time for the Cambridgeshire County Council elections. The third, yesterday, invited me to a Labour “auction of promises”. Conservative/LibDem readers can now provide their own punchline to this post. To make things a […]
Read MoreThatcher’s Son Takes Keen Interest In Politics
This story is just wonderful.
Read MoreWorms
As if to taunt me, a new bookshop has opened between where I live and my local supermarket. It is called “Libra Aries” and it sells volumes of new age bollocks: “Earth Mysteries, Folklore, Druidry, the Northern Tradition, Wicca, Paganism, Shamanism, Golden Dawn, Buddhism, Taoism, Herbs, Vegetarian Cookery, Psychogeography, Self-Publishing & Small Presses, Green & […]
Read MoreA Public Apology To Judith and Arnon
The misspelling “high-acheiver” has scarred your page on counsell.com for months. It even appeared twice! I am so ashamed it hurts.
Read MoreInnocent, M’Lud
PooterGeek has somehow acquired a reputation for taking the piss. It is also currently the sixth highest Google hit for Oliver Kamm, because, although I have publicly said more positive than negative things about his writings, I gave the man a bit of a going over once. Despite these facts I had nothing whatsoever to […]
Read MoreThe Magazine For Bonkers Old Colonels
Non-Brits must understand: Victoria Beckham is not in any way “posh”. At the time she was given her showbiz nickname she was relatively well-off; now she is simply rich. She could buy and sell many genuinely posh—that is titled rather than monied—people, but they probably wouldn’t let her. Even if they had a financial crisis […]
Read MoreSoylent Beige
You know that “chicken” they manufacture?—the stuff that sticks to your teeth when you eat it, the stuff made by lobbing live birds into the air intake of a retired Concorde turbine and spooling the output around an industrial bobbin, before binding and compressing the collected strands into “chunks”, and bleaching them with some waste […]
Read MoreI Am Not Worthy
As an enthusiastic beginner in the world of satire, I can only recognize genius when I see it. [Via Red Deathy at Harry’s Place.] Kim Jong-il, sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and your rugged good looks.
Read More“It Isn’t War”
Via Sgt. Missick, A Line In The Sand, I came to this short, fascinating, and hawkish piece by a military writer about the continuing fighting in Iraq. The author, Richard Hart Sinnreich, endorses the outlook ascribed to Ulysses S. Grant by one of his biographers: “He had no liking at all for the cruel weight […]
Read More“Music is a noninvasive nursing intervention”
Thanks to Jo for this.
Read MoreEmpirical Support
Norm beat me to ‘Blogging new ‘Blogger Eric the Unread’s brilliant attack on linguistic determinism this morning. I have looked over Eric’s first post and his third post and they both made me laugh, but I don’t want to read anything about The Village until I’ve seen the film, so, as far as I’m concerned, […]
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