November 2004

Farewell, Ivor; Hello, Kylie

Over the weekend, Judith told me that a feature-length adaptation of Brideshead Revisited is being planned. For this version, the Catholicism will be toned down. This is the sort of thing Evelyn Waugh might have written into a satire of Hollywood. [“Waugh’s a man? Is he some kind of faggot?!”] Maybe we can petition to […]

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Bleargh

I’ve been in bed for the past couple of days with a nasty little dose of food poisoning. On reflection, it was probably the Stilton, bacon, and red onion baguette that did for me. It tasted wonderful at the time. Because of my illness I’ve been listening to lots of radio. On Friday, as the […]

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Thanks To The Grassly-Khalifehs

I meant to say thank you to Nicholas and Hind for dinner yesterday. In fact it was my discovering that Adam, the latest addition to their family, looks exactly like Nicholas, but smaller and a bit more Arab, that made me post about the Karzai photo. Thanks for the “Death to the Zionist Infidels” shopping […]

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The Anglo-Saxonsphere

A frequent correspondent points me to this story in which Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, takes exception to the Prime Minister of Iraq describing non-participants in the liberation of his country as “spectator” states. My correspondent suggests that, rather than apologize to Juncker, Allawi should have told the esteemed European leader to “go […]

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And So To Bed

Why do people take hallucinogenic drugs, when sleep deprivation is so effective and cheap? I actually jumped back from the counter in the spotlessly clean local fish-and-chip shop this evening because I thought I saw a rat crawl near my feet. Sitting up all night to get strange kicks would deprive the posh user of […]

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Dub Be Good To Me

Thank you to the people who were nice about my music. I’d just like to point out that Barry W, who I swear I have never even heard of before, was scarily perceptive on all fronts when (after being nice) he typed: “It had a real film soundtrack feel to it – I saw a […]

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Result

I was wrong. The one who looks like Alfred E. Neumann beat the one who looks like Frankenstein’s monster. Talking of Frankenstein and his monster, below you can read one of those strange PooterGeek entries where I write nothing about something and a debate breaks out over the something I said nothing about.

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Unfreeing Markets

Catastrophic irony failure: yesterday’s You And Yours on Radio 4 juxtaposed an item about Eliot Spitzer’s deliciously successful strike against price fixing in the US insurance industry with one about how a local authority in the Taunton area wants pubs and bars in the area to introduce a “minimum drink price” scheme to reduce binge […]

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My Excuse

Yes, I’ve been away for a couple of days, making music. In the past, bands I have sung with have banned me from writing songs on my own, because, without a collaborator to keep me in check, mine all sound like the work of Lenny Kravitz armed with a thesaurus. Working alone for the first […]

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The Drugs Don’t Work

Thoughtful James Hamilton might come by to say something about this one. The Economist this week has a fascinating piece [subscription only] about the decline in suicide rates in the UK. No one has a sure explanation for why the numbers of men and women killing themselves in Britain have declined by tens of percent […]

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