This [HD YouTube video] is a bonkers slab of wonderfully British-sounding soul-pop from V VBrown. Shame about the over-compressed production/mixing/mastering that turns every peak into white noise.
This [HD YouTube video—censored version] is an equally bonkers slab of ironic hair metal from the self-proclaimed “modern Spinal Tap”, Steel Panther. I know it’s meant to be a joke, but […]
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 […]
Cornershop Man watches every single cricket international he can on his satellite TV under the counter—and, unlike me, he fails the Tebbit test. At the start of the week, I asked him: “Suppose you’re looking forward to whupping England’s backsides?”
“Hmm,” he inhaled, “I don’t know. You’ve got some good bowlers with you. You could give […]
[UPDATE: For the hordes arriving here after searching for the comedy catchphrase “Jumpers for goalposts”, you’d probably be better off reading this.]
Yesterday afternoon, I interrupted some desk-bound consulting work that, even if I weren’t prevented by an NDA from doing so, would put you to sleep instantly if I told you about it, to listen […]
While I’m on a Radio 4 kick, I heard Mark Lawson interviewing the soon-to-be-stepping-down Andrew Motion and Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, on Front Row yesterday evening about the appointment of the next Poet Laureate. Apparently, although they were quick to say it wouldn’t be a TV talent contest, there’s going […]
TIGER WOODS WINS 2008 US OPEN DESPITE KNEE INJURY CAUSED BY ILLEGAL KARATE ATTACK FROM EVIL MAFIA GOLFER ROCCO MEDIATE. OBTAINS CRUCIAL PAR SCORE ON SUDDEN-DEATH HOLE USING “CRANE KICK” BEFORE COLLAPSING ON THE FINAL GREEN IN AGONY, MUTTERING “I DID IT FOR YOU, ELIN!”
LEWIS HAMILTON CLINCHES WORLD F1 DRIVERS’ CHAMPIONSHIP IN HIS MCLAREN, “HERBIE”, DESPITE […]
My getting into this game had nothing to do with some kind of 9/11 epiphany. No, it was the insanity of the property bubble that started me writing spoofs and screeds on the Web, originally at the excellent, skeptical, principled, and free Motley Fool UK site. I retired from posting on its “Property: Markets and […]
I like that one of the authors of this US paper describing gene therapy to restore sight in sufferers from a rare form of blindness, itself a refinement of a treatment first given in the UK, is called “Elizabeth Windsor”:
“One of the patients said that the dim red light from his alarm clock had gotten so […]
This week, I saw John The Savage and Bela Emerson at Komedia.
John The Savage is an experimental post-something-or-other band featuring my friend Richard Brincklow on piano. Don’t be put off by my arty-sounding and vague description. They have tunes and they can play. They groove and they rawk. But they’re also very unusual indeed. Go see […]
In the summer of 2006, a particular grim one for British sport, this blog made public the list of new events planned for the 2012 London Olympics. Following the nation’s successes in Beijing, that has been further revised to include the following, again in alphabetical order:
4x4 Hundred-School Run
Aussie Baiting
Chopper-, Grifter-, Strika-, and Tomahawk-Class Cycling
Eton Fives
Guyball
Jolly Hockey
Lewd Behaviour
Not Cricket
Pistol Shooting At Dawn
Post-modern Pentathalon:
Roistering,
Rogering,
Raffishness,
Rabble-rousing, and
Roguery
Private Yachting
Quidditch
Seated Pole Vault
White-Water Cravating
While I’m […]
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 beers […]
One of the sweetest things about beating the Aussies is that they are spectacularly bad losers.
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.
Surely Margaret Thatcher doesn’t want a state funeral? I mean, that would require the government to pay people to dig a hole and fill it up again.
Norm asks two questions:
People on the wrong end of social and economic inequalities don’t just experience health disadvantages from smoking, but disadvantages across the board - in every area of health, in life expectancy, in the pattern of life chances in general. Shall we impose compulsory legal norms about diet, about exercise, about whatever else, […]
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 me, one of these images was […]
The “pictures” included a front-page one of the torturer dressed in a pink nurse’s outfit that stopped just above the tops of her black stockings
For those of you not up to date with the PooterGeek soap opera, having been made redundant from my first permanent job in science (when the Medical Research Council closed down […]
NASA ASTRONAUTS ARRIVE ON CENTAURI IV AND ENCOUNTER POPULATION OF HUMANOIDS SO PRIMITIVE THAT THEY STILL HAVE FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS.
PANEL OF HISTORIANS VOTES ON MOST HATED FIGURES OF 21ST CENTURY. SADDAM HUSSEIN, CLONED HITLER, HEATHER MILLS-MCCARTNEY TOP POLL.
HUMPHREY LYTTELTON FORCED TO STAND DOWN AS PRESENTER OF I’M SORRY I HAVEN’T A CLUE AFTER EXPOSURE TO SUNLIGHT LEAVES HIM […]
It’s all over for the ‘Head
On the front page of The Spectator online, Fraser Nelson suggests that David Cameron could be “the British [Barack] Obama”, which struck me as a coincidence, because I am the British Gore Vidal.
I’d like to take this opportunity to reassure my readers that I survived the horrors of this morning, and am now doing all I can to help with the aid effort and piece together the scattered fragments of my life. Here is my photographic tribute to those who were less fortunate:
A couple of my friends txted me this morning to let me know that PooterGeek is in The Guardian’s Guide today. Unfortunately, as has been the case for most of the past week, I’m too busy to write anything new and the best-of section is over a year out of date. Come back next week, […]
Just back from lunch watching the first half of Villa versus Newcastle at my local. (Joey Barton is a dirty…) I live dahn Sarf now so there were about five people apart from me interested in the Midlands against the North-East dotted around the fairly large TV room.
In walks a big black Senegalese bloke I’ve never […]
The latest political scandal uncovered on BBC Radio 2 news this morning was a Conservative MP being “late to declare hospitality from McDonald’s”. Imagine an Italian person hearing that report and trying to make any kind of sense of it at all.
Mick Hartley links to a Times report of a “serious” novelist suing the proprietors of a neighbouring factory because the fumes it produced so affected her concentration that she was reduced to writing genre fiction. It’s not just a funny hook for a news story; it’s a delicious illustration of how class and status in […]
Thank you to Beardsleys and Counsells for their hospitality and generosity. Oop North, they know how to enjoy themselves, but local children don’t have it as good as my niece and nephew:
fattist oppression in action
FIRST ANTIQUE DEALER: Do you have a double-U-double-U-double-U number?
SECOND ANTIQUE DEALER: ?
FIRST ANTIQUE DEALER: An, er, Internet address?
