Rory Sutherland’s wiki man column in The Spectator is one of the few things remaining inside that magazine that might yet tempt me to buy another print copy. In his latest he sticks a finger through one of the biggest holes in the Tories’ buckshot “Big Society” balloon of bullshit: In one sense, it seems, the […]
In Web time, this is an ancient (1991) essay, so I don’t feel guilty that I can’t remember who drew my attention to it today: “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard”. Someone once said that learning Chinese is “a five-year lesson in humility”. I used to think this meant that at the end of five years […]
The Paperless Office, like The Flying Car, is one of those technological icons of the future whose ascendancy, no matter how much time passes, seems stuck in the future; but I reckon offices without paper are going to become more common more quickly than cars that fly. Indeed, we do seem to be printing fewer […]
I’ve been known to be uncomplimentary here about Tamworth, the town where I grew up. Back in the 80s, an Australian barman once told a friend of mine that, travelling around England, it was the place where he had been beaten up most frequently for being Australian. And he was white. Thanks to Paulie for drawing […]
For the past four years, I have been involved in a dispute with a utility company over a sum that ultimately amounted to several thousand pounds. The company will remain nameless here because, today, thanks to the intervention of the relevant government watchdog, we finally settled without having to go to court. It is a […]
Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right. If you run into Elton John at the diner and say, “Hey Elton, will you sing at my daughter’s wedding?” it hurts any chance you […]
Back in the 80s, I used to be in a band with a guy called Martyn Hope—indeed, we went to school together. Back in the 90s, having read that, surreally, Elvis revivalist Shakin’ Stevens was a closet Red1, I went searching online to find out if he was a member of a late 70s cohort […]
The other day, I was (as one so often is) on the door at the latter stages of a central Brighton soul and Motown event with a mixed-race lesbian bouncer. She leerily told me tales of her days running sapphic club nights, and how the punters only really started to pile in when she imported […]
Whenever someone implies that anti-Semitism isn’t racism, I point out that it’s one of the few examples of discrimination that really is racism (unlike, for example, the invented thoughtcrime “Islamophobia”1 ) because the Ashkenazi Jewish population is as close as you can get scientifically to the common (and deeply flawed) notion of what a “race” is. […]
I hope that, wherever you are, you enjoyed the extra second imposed upon you by the imperialist forces of the dominant scientific-capitalist worldview and that you have a prosperous 2009. As for my year so far, I jogged wearily to the gym this morning, dreading the crowds of resolutioners (though it hasn’t been too bad in […]
A lot of people spend their youth experimenting. As my mother often tells people who really don’t want to know, I spent my youth experimenting: with chemicals, electricity, and the flora and fauna of Birmingham’s green belt. Just like my peers who took part in drug parties, random sexual coupling, and street violence—I suppose I […]
And now, like a page from Where’s Wally / Where’s Waldo?, see if you can spot the wedding photographer in this [large!] image. He’s cunningly camouflaged by being the same colour as the furniture. (The camera to my left has a 50mm f/1.4 lens on it and the one in my hands a 100mm f/2.8. The […]
Further to my last post about this, Russell Brand makes a proper apology to camera here. I can think of several politicians (amongst others) who could learn from it. He doesn’t mess about with words like “inappropriate”, which these days is used to describe everything from ironically referencing a passage in the Koran to trying […]
I typed the postcode of the house in which I grew up into the box here and it turns out that my childhood decision to support Aston Villa cannot be challenged under the manly rules of manliness.
Remember that very “English” black-and-white print I made of a café in Hove? This supersaturated colour medium-format slide film shot of another corner café, taken in Argentina, is a nice counterpoint to it; even the angles of the shadows are similar. As the photographer says, the stock it was taken with came out of the freezer. Old […]
[BY TELEPHONE] CLIENT-I-WON’T-MISS: [giggling] …and I saw the pictures of that gay wedding on your Website. POOTERGEEK: I shoot Gays, Catholics, Protestants, Humanists, Blacks, Whites, Jews… CLIENT-I-WON’T-MISS: Well, I suppose you have to be prepared to work for anyone when you’re starting out.
Both of these photos are from the same wedding, at the most excellent Barn at Bury Court. I took the first on one side of the venue (with my camera in a transparent shower cap to protect it from the rain) and the second, later, on the other side, when the rain had stopped. Boys with […]
It was quiet here last week because I had a lot of things on—to the extent that I had to stop off at the 24-hour Tesco superstore in the small hours of Saturday on the way back from singing at a gig to do my week’s shopping. I’ve read some extreme tales about the goings […]
A fortnight ago, I shot the Brighton School of Samba at Brighton’s Second revived carnival. Congratulations to them. They went on to win the prize for best band.
I had to replace my mobile phone recently, so I deliberately downgraded. After perfunctory Internet research, I got a Nokia 6300. If you are not one of the Young People and you use your phone for business then it is a most excellent tool. If you want to blog or surf the Net from your […]
These are both old (by blogging standards) and from the unlikeliest of sources, but I think they’re excellent: Marketer Seth Godin on how to send email and 79-year-old Catholic priest Pat Connor on how to choose a spouse.
Do you remember Wei? Well, Wei… …wed… …Bobby… …in Edinburgh earlier this month, and I was hired to shoot the event. It wasn’t my first tri-lingual wedding, but it was my first Cantonese/Mandarin/Scottish one. And it was the first one from which the happy couple excused me in the small hours because the tea ceremony was over-running. [Unusually for […]
This is simply wrong: Harriet Harman has defended plans to make it legal for firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minorities job candidates. The equalities minister said firms should be able to choose a woman over a man of equal ability if they want to.
Another “shocking state of our universities today” story has appeared on the BBC news Website. A report from the Quality Assurance Agency says the degree classification system is broken. I smiled when I read this bit: The reports from the QAA raise some worries about the effectiveness of the external examiner system, in which examiners from […]
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 […]
[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 would […]
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 image […]
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: […]