August 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 […]

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Funny 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, […]

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In-Joke

If you are a regular at Harry’s Place the idea of a film called “Benjy—Off The Leash“, with the tagline: “This summer: drool rules!” is amusing. Everyone else reading this can go back to whatever it was they were doing.

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Cults

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 […]

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Charlotte 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 […]

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Mark 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 […]

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Humphrys. 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, […]

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Thanks, 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.

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Not 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 […]

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Fahrenheit 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.

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Make 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 […]

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Two 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”.

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New 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 […]

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Worms

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 & […]

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Innocent, 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 […]

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The 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 […]

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Soylent 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 […]

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I 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.

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“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 […]

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Empirical 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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