Hak has a nice story about the fall of Thatch. I remember spending a day at work singing “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” I’m pleased that the Wikipedia entry about her corrects the strangely widespread myth that she achieved a Double First at Oxford. The truth is she collected a Desmond—and I think we can […]
Today is Saddam Hussein’s 666th day in captivity. As a mark of my respect for the legal head of the sovereign state of Iraq, currently imprisoned by the quislings of the Imperialists’ puppet regime, I am ‘Blogging this in my underpants.
Further to the THES’s collection of historical dramas that academics most fear Hollywood making, you must, must watch the trailer for the upcoming Casanova. My favourite bit? Addressing Jeremy Irons (who might as well be twisting a waxed moustache and stroking a Persian cat), Sienna Miller delivers a line that Basil Exposition himself would have […]
Michael Brooke takes Enid Blyton’s testimony.
You don’t have to be an Aston Villa supporter—or even a football fan (not that the two things are necessarily related)—to appreciate the miserable poetry of this eBay item description. It’s of a Villa away shirt dating from about a year after I could last reliably name all the members of the first team. [via Bad English]
Mark A Rayner at the skwib has found William Wallace’s long lost USB stick of PowerPoint presentations. Here are those crucial Battle of Sterling Bridge bullet points: We smell like crap We can’t read We’re covered in woad Time to kick some ass!
…Tony Blair had a mullet.
“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 pictures […]
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.”
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 […]
Please, sir, first Mick said all that mass murderering in the olden days was Karl’s fault, then everyone just piled in.
Hak thinks meeting me in the flesh qualifies her to reduce me to pixels. Mini-Me and Eitan Eitan thinks I look like the very late King Tut Tut
George Bush beats Britney Spears; Martin Luther beats George Washington; Tony Blair beats Michael Jackson beats Jesus Christ; Bill Clinton beats Saddam Hussein; Osama Bin Laden beats Kofi Annan; Bob Dylan beats Donald Rumsfeld; Angelina Jolie beats Arnold Schwarzenegger. But tough luck to Madonna, Seal, Bono, and Sting. If you’re so famous you have one […]
After reading Anthony’s piece about Google bombs, I couldn’t resist a peek at “Jew Watch”, the anti-Semitic conspiracy site that came so high in searches for the word “Jew” that the civilized world had to displace it with a Google bomb. Their front page story (complete with photo of the recently deceased) is—I kid you […]
One evening during my recent week off ‘Blogging I was working with the radio on and heard an advertisement for 1 Xtra, a (relatively) new digital radio station extending the celebrity-/booze-/shagging-obsessed tabloid youf franchise of Radio 1 to Britain’s blacks. The ad’s female voiceover trailed a “documentary” about Condoleezza Rice with the words, “She has […]
By way of shaming His Comatose Stoatness I give you PooterGeek’s very own Dead Socialist Watch.
Yesterday I had lunch with a “fellow” Catholic whose grandfather used to hide fugitive members of the “old” IRA in his house in the Irish countryside. We discussed the disgust being expressed by republicans north and south of the border at the behaviour of the supposed descendants of his grandad’s lodgers. Cathal (not his real […]
In the 80s my hair was bigger than hers—and here she is giving me a certificate saying so: [click image to enlarge]
Brian Whitaker in The Guardian—where else?—writes under the heading “Fig-leaf Freedom”: “portrayals of the election as ‘historic’ are way off mark” Unlike the election, Brian’s insights will ring through the ages like Orwell’s. He is, after all, the Middle East specialist who wrote of the US Presidential election: “What interests Arabs most is America’s attitude towards […]
Much as it pains me to write this, it turns out that Sisyphus had one legitimate grievance. This post of mine might be interpreted to mean that the organisation formerly known as Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI) questioned the existence of “mass” “graves” in “Iraq” and the “arrest” of Saddam Hussein. I am happy […]
Kennedy says Iraq is ‘Bush’s Vietnam’. But, if Bush=Hitler, surely it’s his Eastern Front? That can’t be, of course, because Kabul was supposed to be America’s Stalingrad—as was, er, Baghdad. At least we can be sure that Abu Ghraib is Iraq’s My Lai—as long as it’s not true that September 11 2001 was the new […]
Good socialists here, here, and here ‘Blog the demise of Rosa Luxemburg, but it is important that the loss of another Rosa Luxemburg is not overlooked—by Chris especially, and by others of the Left who, unlike Dr Brooke, are now almost certainly working as management consultants, investment bankers, or barristers: “Dons at an Oxford University […]
Explanations of yesterday’s jokes are here and here. Deary me, the quality of my audience .
I’m ashamed to say that, after I read it at the Motley Fool, it took me fourteen hours to get this joke: “My daughter asked me for some Nikes for her birthday. I said: ‘You’re nine—you can make them yourself.’” I’m proud to say that this one from Radio Two made me laugh instantly: “Who led the […]
Claire sent me this one. I’m not going to tell you what to think. If you find something familar about the text, you do; if you don’t, you don’t. Either way, it’s chilling history.
I am pulling out of the Genome Campus when I notice the car in front of me has a registration which is just a couple of characters away from spelling out “deontic”. First I think, “A near miss like that’s a bit of a shame.” Then I think, “Yeah, but what is the size of […]
I suspect that, “beta” release or not, I am late to the wonderfully odd resource that is NNDB. If you have not already been there yourself I must warn you now that, if you follow the link, you may be some time. “NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have […]
Gosh! Wow! According to the Beeb, women eighty years ago were writing diaries similar to Bridget’s! It’s like they were ahead of their time! Or, or…
PooterGeek’s Catholic Affairs correspondent texted me from the beatification ceremony in Rome yesterday. Apparently it was very hot.
I’ve been far too easy on you lot. Yesterday, in his eponymous and epurating ‘Blog, Oliver Kamm wrote of Johann Hari’s (silly) attack on Opus Dei*: “[His] term Catholofascism is not accurate. There was in the 1920s a group known as clerico fascisti in Rome and Northern Italy, which aimed at a synthesis between Catholicism […]