You expect celebrity kids to grow up into adults with dependencies; you expect 80s pop stars to turn into casualties: Gary Coleman, Michael Jackson, Jason Donavan; Adam Ant, Whitney Houston, Billy Mackenzie, Billy Idol, MC Hammer, Stuart Adamson… But the phenomenon that scares me is that of the thirtysomething swashbucklers of my youth—then celebrated for […]
photo by Osito Tai I’m not dead, just busy. There’ll be something new here tomorrow—probably.
My dad has long been associated, as a member and officer, with the largest UK teaching union, the NAS/UWT. Indeed, in classic working-class northerner style, he first had a heart attack as he arrived at a union conference. Equally typically, after it was initially misdiagnosed by a junior doctor as a digestive problem, he just […]
Last week, I noticed a registered Brighton & Hove taxi parked outside the Muslim community centre. Prominent on the dashboard was a hardback copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A couple of days later I saw the car (and the book) again. This time the vehicle was being attended to by two of B&H’s […]
…because I stupidly fried my archiving PC on Sunday evening: melted plastic, smoke, the works. I’m boring about these things so I lost no data, but I did lose too many hours to re-building and re-configuring hardware and software and restoring files. And now I’ve just rounded the tedium off by fishing the last couple […]
Again, no time for proper blogging, but these are fun, but Not all Safe For Work.
When I was in Belgium last week, I was surprised to discover that it was just like the movies:
…Mr Adams, the court has been presented over the course of these proceedings with a stupefyingly lengthy and diverse catalogue of wrongdoing. I restrict myself now to only a handful of the most appalling examples. We have heard from one of your clients, Mr Barry “Knuckles” Law, that, on the 7th of May 1998, he hired […]
“Chippy!” is the cry of a winner in the lottery of birth losing an argument. There’s a scene near the beginning of Casino Royale in which Vesper Lynd practises some amateur psychology on 007 as they sit opposite each other on the Eurostar. She says something like: You’re Oxford, but not from money, hence that huge chip […]
During the dying months of my doing bioinformatics for a living, I attended a scientific conference in Scotland. I helped to run a few of the seminars there, but had nothing to do with their planning. At one, I marched to the front during a student’s presentation and told a member of the audience to stop […]
My apologies to people who are waiting for email replies and blog content and other things. I’ve been away and out and I’ll probably begin to catch up with my email backlog on Wednesday.
Over the past few years, both here and elsewhere, I have from time to time suggested that Robbie Williams is an individual of limited talent whose output has consisted mainly of hamfisted pastiche, northern English karaoke of the sort that belongs alongside the deliberately lighthearted performances of stand-up comedian Peter Kay rather than next to […]
I’ve been staying at my parents’ this weekend—thanks, folks—while I’ve been attending the National Wedding Show [of which more soon at the Wedding Photography Blog]. The show was on at the National Exhibition Centre, round the corner from their place. As a boy I never imagined that I’d grow up to spend working Saturdays, for […]
I’m sitting here eating a microwaved vegetable biryani in front of my computer, having returned from a Ginsters-fuelled morning shoot of a band at Shoreham Airport, a cute, art deco building surrounded by dodgy Italian mopeds of the sky—not just propellor aircraft that look like they are powered by elastic bands, but helicopters that were […]
Yesterday I had two meetings in London, so I spent a bit of time on the Tube. I am fascinated by posters on the Underground. There’s an hilariously “retro” one for the Cyprus tourist board up at the moment that I imagine being devised by two sideburned ad execs, fresh from lunch in the pub […]
I’m in Dixons Currys.digital, buying a new computer keyboard. What sounds like a competent cover version of Starship’s We Built This City is playing. For a moment I wonder if it’s the start of one of those godawful trance retreads of 80s guitar hits. You know the sort of thing: Owner Of A Lonely Heart/Max […]
I’m taking a few days off from blogging because I’m busy so I will leave you, as always on such occasions, with one of PooterGeek’s famously hilarious repackaged jokes. But first, this is perhaps a good time to link to one man’s account of his attempt to go without the Net for a week: Day 2: […]
Via things magazine, I discovered an article in the Archinect about how when the people of the virtual community Second Life are given freedom to build whatever they want they recreate suburbia.The author of the piece broadcasts his own prejudices. I hate shopping as well, but I winced at this: [L]ike most utopias, [Second Life] […]
Today, via Photo Matt, I discovered a phrase that I wish I had known about years ago: “The adage, “Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?”, means: just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color […]
Remember this place? Yesterday I’m in there and a middle-aged white bloke in a cravat is sounding off at the (Gujarati) proprietor as the nearest consultable expert on the question of contemporary Indian pulchritude. “Everybody says that one on Big Brother is beautiful, but I’ve seen better. She’s very pale skinned. I wonder if she […]
Part of my exercise warm-up is my brief run from my flat to the gym. A short distance from the front door of the club I begin walking cautiously to avoid being run over by a Mercedes or Jaguar whizzing down the drive. We are currently in the season of the resolutionists so, even during my […]
Germany has the lowest birthrate in Europe. Luckily, help is at hand.
Over at my other blog I’ve been writing about touching up women, and summarising what I learned about photographing weddings from watching Armageddon. The latter has proved to be popular with outsiders so I am linking it from here for those who aren’t regulars at The Wedding Photography Blog. I don’t mention it there and didn’t […]
I used to tithe a proportion of my earnings to Oxfam. At least three friends of mine have worked for them. One of them wrote the organisation’s first official monograph on the genocide in Rwanda. I stopped giving Oxfam my money when they sent me junk mail inviting me to invest in a so-called ethical fund—that’s […]
Given that I spent New Year’s Eve alone at my computer keyboard tidying up my remote UNIX home directory, this is going to read like a middle-class white guy wibbling on about how “vibrant” the local “community” is as he moves into a flat in one of London’s tiny ethnic war-zones instead of the Georgian […]
Welcome to 2007! I hope that you all have a better semi-arbitrary time period than the last one. Unless you get your kicks from the suffering of others of course. In which case now is your last chance to give yourself up to the authorities before I track you back to your computer and make a […]
Despite my slack posting there, in the few months since I started it The Wedding Photography Blog has gone to number two hit on Yahoo UK for the search terms “wedding photography”. This is amazing even to me. If you linked to it then thank you. I must extend special gratitude to the anti-Euston Manifesto obsessive in […]
I’ve just returned from another boozy early evening exhibition party. One of the exhibitors is a painter who does portraits from photographs so it was business as well as pleasure. When things finally started winding down, the last people standing were three gay guys, the hostess, one other woman, and me. At that point the […]
Ten non-sexual things a woman (that is: various individual women) has done in the past that have reduced me to Pepe Le Pew: laughed at my hair, dressed like a librarian, correctly fisked my inept critique of a famous theologian, told her pupils about me, pretended not to know how to use chopsticks so that I would teach her, returned my calls, […]