August 2005

Toff Of The Pops

James Delingpole has also noticed James Blunt’s pedigree and the resulting article is very entertaining indeed. Another explanation is that dreamy, floppy, public schoolboy music – “bedwetter music” as Creation Records’ founder Alan McGee once cruelly put it – is very much in vogue at the moment, and has been for quite some time. It […]

Read More

Gone The Way Of Painting

“We have decided that the time is now right to take 35mm cameras out of the frame.” Daddy, why aren’t your photographs flat and over-sharpened? Why are things naturally out of focus in the background instead of blurred later by Photoshop? Why do human beings look human and sunlight look warm? Why can you take […]

Read More

Bombers Are People Too

Thank you for your superb contributions to the Bad Poetry Celebrity Deathmatch, both here and at Harry’s Place. Backword Dave suggested that we were questioning the artistry of the inspirational work of Harold Pinter and Michael Rosen because we disagreed with the poets’ politics. I don’t read his ‘Blog much any more, and when I […]

Read More

The Tebbit Test

Cambridge Sony Shop. Saturday. Your host, Damian “Ebony’n’Ivory” Counsell, and a Sony employee of south Asian descent who’s darker than a sideboard are wincing at the fall of cheap England wickets in their second innings. Mr Sony even goes off on one about a particularly shoddy piece of umpiring in the Aussies’ favour. Meanwhile, all […]

Read More

Nice Fisking, Shame About The Title

I think I’d have enjoyed this article rather more if it had been called “The Rhetoric of the Stupid“, rather than “The Rhetoric of the Left”, but you can’t have everything. No one who has any time for the views of a bunch of Jew-hating, wife-beating, Muslim-killing, gay-hanging, Koran-thumping mass-murderers is any kind of man […]

Read More

Why Carl Hiaasen’s Imagination Doesn’t Have To Work Too Hard

Currently these are the top five most popular stories on Florida’s Local6 news Website: Giant ‘Blue Bird’ On Roof Upsets Neighborhood Killer Bees Found In Louisiana Cops: Man Fabricated Hitchhiker’s Death To Make Wife Leave Giant ‘Bra Fence’ Sparks Controversy Woman Allegedly Sells Sexual Favors To Elderly For $4 [LUNCHTIME UPDATE:] Noteworthy headlines in the […]

Read More

Separated At Birth

To minimize the inevitable public disapproval it is crucial when creating a cloned mammal in your laboratory to make as little mention as possible of your previous failed attempts to do so, and to give your successful clone a cute name: “Dolly” the sheep, “Ralph” the rat, and now “Snuppy”, the Afghan puppy who thinks […]

Read More

Thank You, UK Taxpayers

I’m still feeling rough so, even if there were a laboratory for me to go to (which there isn’t because it’s been shut down), I wouldn’t be there anyway. You lot are paying my wages until September though. So, if any of you have recently sequenced a gene and would like me to predict the […]

Read More

A Lie

BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme five minutes ago in its report on the 60th anniversary of the dropping of The Bomb: “In the United States there was a steely determination to triumph [in the war] in the Far East by whatever means, at whatever cost.”

Read More

Deferred Gratification

When I was a boy and my written German was quite good, I used to have a pen-pal in East Berlin, a young soldier. We would scribble symbols over the seals of our letters to each other, hoping that we’d be able to tell if the authorities had opened our correspondence. Today I was completely […]

Read More

Unknown Talent

I’ve been ill lately—a cold and upset stomach which, if I had a wife, I would tell her was “gastric ‘flu”. Being ill is boring. Yesterday evening I crawled out of bed about nine to entertain myself by surfing the Web for some free music to download. There’s a site where people using a particular […]

Read More

Life And Death In Daily Mail World

Okay, so this post links to an article in the Telegraph, but work with me here. Celebrity newsreader and reality TV ballroom dancer Natasha Kaplinsky has had some difficulty selling her house. This fact opens a piece about other nice middle-class people [British definition] trying to flog their own or their parents’ respective gaffs in […]

Read More

Nice Distinctions

British elites have been inventive and subtle in preserving their advantages. Their most important achievement has been to tilt Britain towards meritocracy and then restrict access to the means by which citizens can prove their “merit”. Those amongst the rich and connected who fancy themselves as progressives have played into the hands of the most […]

Read More
Newer Posts