Jogging from the bank yesterday evening to catch Richard Brincklow’s in-store performance at Passenger’s launch of their new single [buy it now!*], I stopped to photograph this: Regulars will know that I am not an admirer of Banksy’s work, but circumstances and the shrewd planning of the staff at artrepublic temporarily turned the 2006 effort of […]
By PooterGeek
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Also posted in Art, Brighton, Education, Food, Friends, Money, Music, Race, Shopping, Sport, TV
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“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 […]
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 don’t have a TV, but that doesn’t mean I don’t watch it. Having trained myself out of treating television broadcasts as audiovisual wallpaper, whenever I visit friends or relatives and there’s a TV on in the background I have to make a huge effort not to be hypnotized by it. The main reason I […]
So there’s no new content here, but qwghlm is back with an excellent, funny post about ads attacking movie “piracy”. (I’m not sure why he’s so down on the first “viral” video though.)
A little while back, someone linked me to the Geostationary Banana Over Texas. I thought it was just a Web meme / bit of conceptual art fun. It turns out it’s both of these, but it’s also a real project to launch a gigantic inflatable banana into orbit. It’s worth reading that article right to […]
Under the headline COME ON, LET’S GET IT RIGHT ABOUT THE LEFT yesterday’s Observer prints letters both pro and anti the thesis advanced by Nick Cohen’s What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way (excerpted at length in last week’s edition of the paper). One letter in particular made me smile: [Cohen]’s caricature of the ‘liberal-left’ … is a […]
Earlier today I linked to a picture of a cat in a box before linking to a picture of a cat on a man’s hat. That was before I discovered this animated image of a cat clinging to Jeremy Paxman’s hair.
[A New England meadow. A delicately beautiful Indian woman in a simple smock dress picks daisies with which to decorate her hair.] INDIAN WOMAN [singing to herself as she gazes into the forest beyond]: “बिछड़े अà¤à¥€ तो हम, बस कल परसों,” “जियूà¤à¤—ी मैं कैसे, इस हाल में बरसों?” “मौत न आई, तेरी याद कयों आई?” “हाय, […]
Jeremy Paxman gets hate mail from BBC viewers who incorrectly believe him to be Jewish. Christopher Hitchens claims to be Jewish, but his brother Peter claims not to be. Most people assume Nick Cohen is Jewish, but he says he isn’t. Several of my best friends are Jewish. If I keep fixing their computers for them […]
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 […]
According to ITVNews the somewhat erratic former superstar and object of Osama’s lust Whitney Houston “is convinced that the 21-year-old [X-Factor TV talent show winner Leona] will be an international superstar and has even offered to mentor her.” Sister, you need Whitney Houston as a mentor like you need Michael Jackson as a babysitter.
Their Website’s tagline could be the most horrible “high concept” conceivable today: “Web 2.0 Reality TV” Their banner photo features a twentysomething in thick-black-rimmed retrospectacles and casual wear carrying a pile of chuggable soft drinks. Their About page contains the following phrases: “captures the promise, the perils, the pride, the pressure, the pain and pitfalls of […]
In the latest edition of your super soaraway Foreign Policy there is, shockingly, a year’s-end top ten. Those crazy dudes at FP—bringing you close-up views of the hottest international relations—have collected the most significant “Stories You Missed in 2006” and they are grimly interesting, including for example India helping Iran to build the bomb and […]
But I’ll believe almost anything of the world of the media. Read the tale of OJ and Judith and Rupert before it disappears behind the New York Times’ subscription wall.
I refuse to believe that this man exists.
Hilary Mantel is a novelist. I haven’t read any of her books. I have read her review of magician Derren Brown’s Tricks Of The Mind in yesterday’s Guardian. Near the end of her mostly negative assessment she tries to set up a weak joke: she “hopes” that “no intellectual snobbery” will prevent Richard Dawkins from […]
It appears that there is a serial killer murdering prostitutes in Suffolk. Jeremy Vine has just been interviewing Frances Curran, Scottish Socialist Party Member of the Scottish Parliament for the West of Scotland on BBC Radio 2. She argued that the victims should not be referred to in the media as “prostitutes” because this “invites a judgment” […]
You’ve probably seen this one already because it was on Metafilter and has been going around for a couple of days. I found it via Mick Hartley. If you haven’t yet done so, hop to the Surrey Comet Website, where readers have been invited to comment on a story about how town centre managers have […]
If you are familiar with the official French attitude* to the use of English in academic (and other cultural) settings, the appearance of a state-funded TV station, “France 24”, with an English-language feed might surprise you. It did me when I watched one of their online English-language video ads a few days ago. They also broadcast Arabic. […]
Beat this, Jesus of Nazareth. [thanks to Liam]
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 […]
On the way to Intenso to drop off some photos, I passed the windows of an art supplies shop and snapped these items from the display with my cameraphone.
Clive Davis is discouraged from seeing Casino Royale, the new new Bond, by of this review by Cosmo Landesman. He shouldn’t be. Landesman fails to grasp even the basics of the (not particularly complicated) plot and then complains that what he thinks is going on is “absurd”. It’s worse than that: understanding what is actually […]
Following on from my previous post, the entertaining flickr pages of a posh Asian-Italian woman called Robyn are at the end of this link, including her own pics of Brighton from her recent visit with her man. (They seem to be public so I don’t think this makes us voyeurs. She’s part of the Bobbie […]
Of course, some of the adverts are still amazing.
I have returned from the lands of my childhood: the Midlands. With me I’ve brought six crates of my old books, reclaimed from storage at my parents’ house, a new water pump in the engine of my car, and a stinking cold—thank you, Maisie and Sam, you cute little bundles of virions. Naturally I took the […]
Don’t ask me how I found this review, but, goodness me, there are some strange programmes on TV.
I hadn’t noticed this until I read Tom Hamilton’s post at Let’s Be Sensible, but the Devil’s Kitchen calls the Mr Eugenides essay that I blogged about “one of the finest posts ever written”. Does Eton College do refunds? Also, having read the latest post at Never Trust A Hippy, I must revise my slur on […]
I look forward to the day when a member of the Blue Peter team shows how to make this tampon air rifle on the BBC.