Category Archives: History

Parachute Pants

hammertime 2 —originally uploaded by gigiagius. Fresh from Iran’s Holocaust conference here’s a screen capture from a revisionist film showing the Nazis for the fun-loving japesters they really were. (And this is neat.)

Brian Blessed Knew His Father

Gerard Butler spends almost all of the trailer for the upcoming 300 SHOUTING HIS BEARD OFF.

Not German Efficiency

I am notoriously sensitive to people revealing the plots of television series and films. As pharma geek Anthony correctly diagnosed, I watch things long after their broadcast/release, often via Amazon’s cheap and cheerful rental-by-post system, and I don’t have a TV. A side-effect is that many of my reviews here are out-of-date, but at least […]

NO2INSANITY

Sometimes your first instinct is to sympathise with a particular cause until you meet the people who believe in it—and find them in your local park dressed in black polythene bags and engaged in a one-sided debate with a squirrel. Like Eurosceptics [Euroskeptics?], anti-ID card campaigners have a whole array of sound, rational arguments at their […]

The History Of The Future Past

Look at these fascinating slides of a 1959 lecture made about plans for the moon landings.

Frozen Moment

This is a beautiful example of the possibilities of social software and of the impression of three-dimensionality you can create with slide film.

Top Ten Scariest Invented Celebrity Couples

Mr Vincent Price and Mrs Katie Price Mr Phil Collins and Mrs Joan Collins Mr Don King and Mrs Billie-Jean King Mr Genghis Kahn and Mrs Jemima Khan Mr Ben Thatcher and Mrs Margaret Thatcher Mr Steve Tyler and Mrs Bonnie Tyler Mr George W Bush and Mrs Kate Bush Mr Patrick Moore and Mrs […]

Two More Apologies

In response to the previous PooterGeek post I received an email from a reader in Dulwich who wishes to make it clear that, despite buying property there, the Thatchers never actually took up residence in her neighbourhood. I’m sorry for suggesting otherwise. I’ve also toned down the language I used about Susan Greenfield back here because […]

WebThatch

[Through a tiny RealPlayer window it is difficult to make out the gloomy interior of a top-of-the-range Executive Home in Dulwich. The scene brightens as a fluorescently-lit life-support pod opens and we catch a glimpse of a giant electromechanical hand lowering a pulsating mass of hair onto MARGARET THATCHER’s scalp. One lower petal of the […]

The Satisfying Sound Of Leather Hitting Trouser

As you’d expect from an embittered wannabe academic like me, I enjoy immensely reading reviews in which genuine scholars demolish the latest fashionable nonsense published by trend-chasing academic presses. Here Ben Goldacre casually and rightly puts the boot into an absurd attack on evidence-based medicine—it’s “fascist” apparently. Here Shalom Lappin does a grand and rigorous job on […]

Test Drive The New Volkswagen Pantheon

One of PooterGeek’s current side projects is The New Uxbridge Encyclopedia Of The Classical World, a vital and relevant guide to what has often been dismissed as a dead discipline, specifically designed to appeal to comprehensive school pupils. Just like the compilers of the OED, the staff of the NUECW welcome submissions from the general public […]

Hot Wheels In Hot Pants

Sorry it’s been quiet. I’ve been working my way through hundreds of photo scans. Once I’ve finished I’ll be back in action here and on the Wedding Photography Blog. In the meantime I couldn’t help but notice something familiar about one of the snaps I took on the river in Cambridge at Hot Wheels Helena’s 30th […]

Fear The Gobblers!

Today’s featured Wikipedia article reveals that velociraptors were probably covered in feathers, stupider than cats, and the size of turkeys. Once again scientific accuracy ruins a fun night out at the cinema.

PooterGeek Links To Bestial Nazi PhotoBlog

I realise I’m somewhat behind the wave on this, but, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, thanks to Hot Wheels Helena for “Cats That Look Like Hitler”.

How Cool Is This Man?

I’ve just had one of those “ain’t life sweet?” moments: finally, after a long hot drive home from my parents’, I got to eat my dinner whilst I listened to the BBC Radio 4 Front Row special about musician and producer Quincy Jones. Asked about his famous Las Vegas live recording with Frank Sinatra, he begins: […]

Your Fifteen Minutes Start Now

The blogtacular Grammar Puss sticks it to Sandi Thom, a “politically aware” songstress who keeps it so real that her marketing people have to invent an up-from-the-Net overnight sensation story to give her some street cred. And dontcha love the way the bint confuses fashion statements with actual achievements? Of course she’d rather sing out […]

I Almost Drowned In My Bath…

…when I heard this evening’s BBC Radio 4 news describe the September 11 attacks on New York as a “terrorist outrage”. Did anyone else catch that or were the vapours rising from my Matey causing me to hallucinate?

Flayme Werre!

One of my toff friends lectures history. She’s been looking for good blogs in her subject area lately and “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog” is her favourite so far. I can see why. It’s clever and it’s funny. (And even funnier now she has explained some of the jokes to me.) As I am in […]

Like Yesterday

The Anonymous Economist draws my attention to this amazing story: James McGaugh is one of the world’s leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he’s stumped. McGaugh’s journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her […]

The Da Vinci Lode

It takes nerve to claim in public you originally extruded the pseudohistorical baloney that was the meat in one of the worst-written bestsellers of all time, but if Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh win their case against Dan Brown it could be the beginning of a long haul. On the “3 for the price of […]

Apparently Some People Update These Weblog Things Once A Day

Sorry, PooterGeekers. I do have a lot of ideas for things to write here, but I don’t have any time to write them this week. I don’t even have time to cut-and-paste a joke here as I usually do before I take a few days off from ‘Blogging. Amongst other little chores I’ve been doing, yesterday […]

Serious ‘Blogging

Nothing much from me, but you should read every last one of these posts from Norm today.

We Must Be Told The Truth About Primitive Knob Jokes

All English comprehensive school desks must by law be engraved, somewhere on their surfaces, with stylized representations of human primary or secondary sexual organs. Why is it whenever some new prehistoric cave art is uncovered it’s always men with spears pursuing unfortunate savannah ungulates? Why do they never find badly-drawn pictures of genitals or breasts […]

Know Thine Enemy

I was going to post the following when it first appeared on Jonathan Derbyshire’s ‘Blog. Norm’s post today reminded me that I hadn’t. Derbyshire makes a point that even militant atheists should concede: As Jeremy Waldron makes clear in his remarkable book God, Locke, and Equality, the principle of human equality articulated in the Second Treatise, which […]

Philip Mountbatten: Comedy God

You must pay attention to the adverts on BBC Radio 4 over the next few days. They are running one that sets a new standard in bathos—and proves that at least one stratum of society is impervious to the “reality” media’s will-to-emote. It starts with a dramatic re-enactment of the last communications from the radio […]

The First To Surrender

Nikon is going to stop making most of its film cameras. Time to have a look at some lousy digital photography. In other news, I’ve just bought another Minolta film camera body.

Beige Christmas

Further to Tim and Eric’s comments, some boring personal information. My mum is from Freetown, Sierra Leone; my dad is from Preston, Lancs. I was born in Nigeria. I left Africa when I was two and have never returned as an adult—even to visit. Since my cousins have all left, and my grandmother there is […]

Channel 4: Nathan Barley Does Foreign Policy

For anyone else who has a Godwinian objection to my recent Channel 4 post, Never Trust A Hippy presents further relevant data: The trailer prior to tonight’s (UK) Channel 4 Dispatches programme ‘America’s Secret Shame’ (part of a series of programmes about the war in Iraq) featured the series’ money quote. It was spoken to […]

Final Revisions

Yesterday’s serious press carried near-full-page advertisements for Channel 4’s new substation “More4“‘s screening of Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s acclaimed cinematic imagining of the last moments of former German head of state Adolf Hitler. These advertisements read: “It’s a happy ending. He dies.” But just how happy an ending was it for the once-proud nation that was Germany, […]

Read And Then Write

I’ve a good mind to drive round to that Andrew Bloggers4Labour and take a sledgehammer to his server. Since he started aggregating comments as well as posts it feels like PooterGeek has been under siege. Now, as regulars know, when someone’s got me bang to rights (see below), I own up, but please, people, can […]