May 2008

How Entertainment Industry Feuds Begin

In the space of a few days, My Scarlett Johansson post has become the subject of a round of Bloggese Whispers. First, Clive Davis linked to my “review” on his Spectator blog. One of God’s little jokes is that Clive Davis, London Times music critic, shares his name with Clive Davis, US record producer, executive, […]

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Falling Down

There is an upside to my not being a drop-dead gorgeous superstar: whenever I’m working with a bunch of stubbly musicians and my singing’s not up to scratch, they tell me, bluntly. I got my first paid residency after helping a pianist move a piano to a restaurant. He asked me to take over from […]

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Hasta la vista, Aunty

OPRAH: I’d just like to say what a great privilege it is to have you with us on the show today, Barry. BARRY: Thank you, Oprah. I’m so grateful to God for my good fortune just to be here, but my good fortune is all the greater for my both being here and being here […]

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Pussy Pedantry

My last post prompted a reader to send me photos of her tortoiseshell cats. [Thank you!] Such a flow of cat pics is of course unconventional in cat blogging, but it gives me an opportunity to point out that it’s only some of the much rarer male tortoiseshells that are the true chimeras, mixtures from […]

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Growing Up

[UPDATE: Edited to use the version of the body text that actually makes some sense with the originally posted title.] I’m not that old, so I’m often puzzled by people who make historical pronouncements in ignorance of recent, relevant history, sometimes history that happened within their lifetimes but not mine. Of course, as Catholic dogma […]

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Jonathan Derbyshire

I’ve converted the archives of Jonathan Derbyshire’s old Typepad blog and built a new WordPress site for him at jonathanderbyshire.com. Update your bookmarks and blogrolls accordingly. (You can email him at that new domain as well.)

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Thamesmead, Riverside School, 76–78

For a long time, PooterGeek’s homepage has been decorated with a school photo of me shot in, I think, 1979. I’ve taken the sensible advice of one of my readers and moved it. It’s still here, but on the “About” page where it doesn’t unbalance the new site design. The original print from which the […]

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Busted By Aunty Beeb’s Licence Nazis

Stephen Pollard (under the title “Is the BBC out of control?”) and the Centre Right Blog at Conservative Home (under the title “Big Brother Corporation“) embed video of the recent, and undoubtedly threatening, ad warning unlicensed TV viewers of the completeness of the TV licensing authority’s database of UK addresses. In SP’s comments, Nicholas writes: […]

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“Unpleasant thuglike looking Jew” Also Jungle Bunny

Like me, Clive Davis is a product of one of those godless unions of black and white, but, because I am an expert on the conspiracy of sinister media Jews, when I took his byline photo I offered to make him look more Jewish in order to help his career. Now see what’s happened. I […]

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“A new, important, effective way of grieving”

Perhaps you remember this story that I read in a “true life confessions” mag in a waiting room?: MY SISTER’S BRUTAL KILLING INSPIRED MY BUSINESS PLAN It seems that, a couple of years on, a US entrepreneur has had the same idea and the result is a similarly Onion-esque report in Wired. Under the headline: […]

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Tarting Up PooterGeek

PooterGeek is now running version 2.5.1 of WordPress and has a new theme, officially “PooterGeek 4.0”. (I’d planned this makeover long before the Harry’s Place mob moved into their nice new place and the redesign of their site was not my work, but I congratulate them on their choice of blogging software.) Most of my […]

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