“Does anyone know the way, there’s got to be a way To Block Buster!”

01May10 – 11:59

This Slate piece about Blockbuster, the movie rental chain, is fascinating; well, it’s fascinating to someone like me who thinks formats and markets and channels and digital data and movies are interesting in themselves. Stir them all together and…

In 2005, Greg Meyer wrote a letter to the management of Blockbuster. He wanted to warn the movie rental company of a looming revolution: DVD vending machines that were showing up at supermarkets and fast-food joints all over the country. At the time, Meyer was the CEO of DVDXpress, which operated DVD kiosks in New York and the United Kingdom. He was offering Blockbuster a chance to get in on what looked to be the next great transformation of the home-video rental business.

If Blockbuster installed a DVD machine outside each of its stores, Meyer argued, it could offer movie rentals even when the store was closed. This would likely increase the revenue at each retail location and let the company reduce its operating hours; with the kiosks, Blockbuster could justify closing each store during the three slowest hours of the business day, saving $140 million a year in operating costs. Meyer gave the Blockbuster board his contact information and proposed a meeting to discuss his kiosks. He never heard back.

Five years later, Blockbuster looks foolish for ignoring the kiosk revolution. Redbox now operates machines at 22,000 locations, and it’s poised to expand to 30,000 by the end of the year. In 2009, Redbox’s parent company, Coinstar, doubled its revenue in the DVD business; Redbox now accounts for about 20 percent of the DVD rental market. Meanwhile, Blockbuster looks nearly sunk. In 2005, when Meyer sent his letter to the board, shares of the company—which had already been roughed up by competition from Netflix—stood at $9. Today, two Blockbuster shares wouldn’t buy you a $1 rental at your local Redbox. With $1 billion in debt, Blockbuster is flirting with bankruptcy.

Yet here’s the crazy thing: Greg Meyer is still trying to save Blockbuster. In 2007, Meyer sold his DVD company to Coinstar. After DVDXpress merged with Redbox, Meyer left the company and used part of his windfall to invest in Blockbuster; he now owns about 650,000 shares of the firm. Despite Blockbuster’s current troubles, Meyer believes the video chain can thrive once again.

By admin | Posted in Money, Movies, The Net, Video | Comments (2)

Lost Appeal

29Apr10 – 23:34

The BBC reports:

A relationship counsellor who refused to offer sex therapy to gay couples has lost his unfair dismissal appeal.

Gary MacFarlane, 47, from Bristol, was sacked by marriage guidance service Relate after he said he could not do anything to promote gay sex.

He alleged Relate had refused to accommodate his Christian beliefs.

The service’s chief executive Claire Tyler said: “The appeal judgement validates Relate’s commitment to equality of access to our services.”

Mr MacFarlane, a former church elder, was appealing on the grounds of religious discrimination at the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Bristol.

The two main quotations below are, to my amazement, from the text of of the relevant judgement by the England and Wales Court of Appeal. The arguments in these extracts seem to me to go beyond those I understand are normally supposed to be included in such documents. I also wonder how much foundation for some of the claims made can be found in English legal history—none is offered at those points the text, and I bet there are plenty of opposing precedents. Still, I agree with the following [apart from the feeble “slippery slope” bit about theocracy], so why should I care?:

[T]he conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however rich its culture, is deeply unprincipled. It imposes compulsory law, not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion. This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence. It may of course be true; but the ascertainment of such a truth lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society. Therefore it lies only in the heart of the believer, who is alone bound by it. No one else is or can be so bound, unless by his own free choice he accepts its claims.

The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic. The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law; but the State, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.

Would you say there’s some creeping Americanization of English law going on there? Like there was in this [PDF 73KB]? I would. Hurrah for the colonies!

[Thanks, Andrew.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Law, Religion, Sex | Comments (0)

Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

29Apr10 – 22:47

Sarah Palin is a phenomenon:

Sarah Palin is a singular national industry. She didn’t invent her new role out of whole cloth. Other politicians have cashed out, used the revolving door, doing well in business after doing good in public service. Entertainment figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and even Ronald Reagan have worked the opposite angle, leveraging their celebrity to make their way in politics. And family dramas have been a staple of politics from the Kennedys—or the Tudors—on down. But no one else has rolled politics and entertainment into the same scintillating, infuriating, spectacularly lucrative package the way Palin has or marketed herself over multiple platforms with the sophistication and sheer ambitiousness that Palin has shown, all while maintaining a viable presence as a prospective presidential candidate in 2012.

The numbers are staggering. Over the past year, Palin has amassed a $12 million fortune and shows no sign of slowing down. Her memoir has so far sold more than 2.2 million copies, and Palin is planning a second book with HarperCollins. This January, she signed a three-year contributor deal with Fox News worth $1 million a year, according to people familiar with the deal. In March, Palin and Burnett sold her cable show to TLC for a reported $1 million per episode, of which Palin is said to take in about $250,000 for each of the eight installments.

[Thanks, Pernille.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Literature, Money, Politics, United States | Comments (1)

Flocking Hell

28Apr10 – 20:02
Gordon Brown hears his own words on tape and covers his face

Beam me up, Mandy

“Bigotgate” [Deliver us from the media’s standard scandal suffix!] has come to this: There’s a report on the BBC News Website that actually devotes a paragraph and two full-colour charts to a 30-minute dip in Twitter sentiment towards Gordon Brown in response to his tetchy grumbling to an aide in the back of his official car today. We are only a couple of years away from the media literally disappearing up their own arses, when they will bring us second-by-second reports on the ripples of microblogging stirred by Nick Robinson accidentally farting while interviewing a party leader.

An odd side-effect of today’s fuss has been a spike in visitors to another entry on this blog, one in which I quote Gordon Brown’s predecessor and long-time colleague Tony Blair expressing his own feelings about xenophobic voters:

A friend sent me an email on Saturday that reminded me of a story about Tony Blair during the ultimately victorious 1997 Labour General Election campaign. (Remember, this is when people were still referring to him as “Bambi”.) Perhaps in a bit of a panic about polling figures, the Tories had decided to play the race card as a last gasp measure. One of his aides asked Blair what he was going to do about it. He is supposed to have said,

“Nothing. If that’s the kind of government the voters want, then fuck ‘em”.

For me, Gordon Brown’s mistake here wasn’t that he was rude about Ms Duffy, who, let’s remember, said the following to him, without irony:

“You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re … but all these eastern European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?”

—which, bigoted or not, is undeniably stupid; it was that he was then grovellingly apologetic about his should-have-been-private verdict on her. His (or his team’s) subsequent backtracking seemed to me less motivated by politeness than by the same fear that prompts representatives of self-described anti-racist parties to respond to local election victories by racist parties by saying things like:

“We cannot dismiss all those who voted for the British National Party today as ‘racist’. Many of them have legitimate concerns that they feel are not being addressed by ourselves in the mainstream parties. We need to go away and think about these issues.”

No. Voting for racist policies is racist. The case for free, but controlled, immigration is sound—just as the case for free, but regulated, trade is sound. If mainstream politicians fail to make it, then mainstream voters will not be persuaded, and the likes of Ms Duffy will continue to spout tribalist nonsense. Despite her claim that her freedom of speech is constrained, the Thought Police haven’t arrested her yet. And I haven’t read a single media commentator suggest that she might have said something worthy of an apology.

I’ll finish with a comment that I didn’t post to the end of a thread on the Facebook page of a Tory friend who registered his approval of the “Gillian Duffy -A BIGOTED WOMAN” page on that site:

Throughout history, talentless and lazy bigots of both the Left and Right have used trade barriers, border controls, closed shops, and plain racial discrimination (both “positive” and “negative”) to protect what they believe to be the most important freedom of all, namely the freedom not to have to compete with talented and hardworking people. History shows us that their cosy dream is wrong and doomed.

UPDATE: This, from a flocking Eastern European is worth reading.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Media, Middle-Aged Man Confused By iPod, Politics, The Web | Comments (14)

Oops, Odone Again

27Apr10 – 23:41

Most literate adults in the UK know that The Daily Telegraph wants the Conservative Party to win the upcoming General Election. Those who have been following the recent public unravelling of that newspaper’s opinionist Christina Odone—she is to the Telegraph what Madeleine Bunting is The Guardian—know that she particularly wants the LibDems to do badly in the same race. (Odone is a Catholic; prominent LibDem MP Evan Harris kills babies with laboratory rats and gasses old people, or something. Plus: Nick Clegg, the party’s leader, is an uncloseted atheist.)

screen cap from Britney Spears' Hit Me Baby One More Time video

a free school

Given that the Daily Telegraph always does its best to keep its circulation up (along with the circulations of retired red-faced colonels) with its notorious titillating inside-front-page provincial sex scandal stories (“toast droppers”) and its traditional method of reporting on GCSE exam results—what Sadie describes as: “Look at all those lovely young blondes who have got A*******************s in Jumping Up And Jiggling Their Ripe Young Bazoombas Studies”—is Ms Odone wise to try to scare Telegraph readers out of voting LibDem with the prospect of a LibDem government making it legal for 16-year-olds to star in porn movies?

[Thanks, Andrew.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Law, Middle Aged Woman Confused By iPod, Movies, Newspapers, Politics, Religion, Sex | Comments (5)

“There is an appropriate use for paper”

27Apr10 – 11:21

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 digital documents, to the extent that at least one unhappy paper manufacturer is trying to persuade people to print more [via Slashdot]. This trend is, I suspect, more a result of better display technology than a response to concerns about waste—and hard-copy printing will, I expect, decline further as cheap, full-colour e-Ink readers increase in number and fall in price.

Mr Williams makes his money from selling paper, so his interest in this is obvious, but many more of us benefit, for other reasons, from businesses continuing to waste paper. For the rest of us, the rise of digital paper isn’t without a downside:

Printer and copier paper retain the nice, long fibers that make the best recycled toilet paper. But a resurgent Chinese economy and domestic waste reduction efforts are cutting the available supply of the good stuff, said Jeff Phillips, executive vice president of operations at Seventh Generation, a major recycled toilet paper manufacturer.

“The cost of office waste paper has skyrocketed (more than doubled) in the last six months primarily as a result of China reentering the market,” Phillips wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “There has [also] been a reduction in availability due to more offices trying to reduce paper consumption and through the use of electronic media.”

By PooterGeek | Posted in Money, Technology, Work | Comments (1)

“Aimless Hostility”

26Apr10 – 20:38

A few days ago, John Gray reviewed A C Grayling’s latest book Ideas that Matter: The Concepts that Shape the 21st Century. To my surprise, someone I know linked to the review approvingly. I was surprised because the review is tosh: hysterical, pompous, and so self-fiskingly stupid that it’s not even necessary to read the volume in question to know that its reviewer has it wrong—at one point Gray makes the mistake of quoting a passage from Grayling’s book, rewrites its meaning, and then attacks his own misrepresentation.

Reading Gray’s review was like watching someone dress up in academic robes, walk into the middle of a college quad, and slap himself in the face repeatedly. In contrast, A. C. Grayling’s crisp response is worth a recommendation.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Academia, History, Middle-Aged Man Confused By iPod, Philosophy, Religion, Science | Comments (2)

Brett Domino Brings Sexy Back

26Apr10 – 13:27

[via Martin Robbins]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Grim Up North?, Music, Sex, Video | Comments (0)

“You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”

26Apr10 – 13:21

[via Anthony]

By PooterGeek | Posted in History, Medicine, Science, Technology, Video | Comments (0)

Identity Crisis

24Apr10 – 20:26

This week, a friend of mine who still reads The Guardian [online—does anyone not looking for a public sector job still pay for the print edition?] drew my attention to a piece there about how success by the Liberal Democrats at the upcoming General Election could “push out black and Asian MPs”. That is, because the LibDems have fewer minority candidates standing, the apparent sharp improvement in that party’s position in the polls recently could be bad for Good Racism.

Good Racism is discriminating between people on the basis of unfounded pseudo-biological prejudice. It’s practised by middle-class people in the pursuit of “diversity”, a state in which a workforce of rich, expensively-educated, well-connected white people is leavened by the forced addition of rich, expensively-educated, well-connected non-white people. (Bad Racism is the strain of pseudo-biological prejudice that infects working-class people.)

The Guardian article is illustrated with a photograph of Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate Chuka Umunna. Umunna was first introduced to me by someone who invited me to laugh at Umunna’s starting a speech by pleading with his audience not to compare him with Barack Obama. Presumably Umunna said this because both he and Obama are privately-educated lawyers whose fathers were politicians.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Brentian Man, Newspapers, Politics, Race | Comments (0)

Two excellent blog posts

05Mar10 – 13:20

The first is at Freemania:

The really important thing about Iraq: us

Today Gordon Brown gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. This weekend, amid violent attacks on polling stations, Iraq holds an election. I wonder which will get the most coverage?

The rest of the world exists primarily as a mirror for us.

The second is at Skuds’ place:

A week is a long time in politics

If a week is a long time in politics then several weeks is long enough for an almighty u-turn. Or is it called a flip-flop these days?

David Cameron on Feb 8th:

For years all parties have taken the same view that someone’s tax status is a matter between them and the Inland Revenue. That needs to change.

David Cameron this week:

You have to respect people’s privacy and you have to respect the view that someone’s tax status is a matter between them and the Revenue.

I wonder what happened inbetween those dates?

By PooterGeek | Posted in Blogs, Iraq, Media, Money, Politics | Comments (0)

Pick Up A Penguin

12Feb10 – 23:10

I didn’t catch this in November, when it was posted, but I can’t miss it now. It’s a YouTube video that tells an astonishing wildlife photography story.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Animals, Antarctica, Photography, Video | Comments (1)

Sounds of silence

08Feb10 – 09:20

Via Slashdot, here’s an abstract of a study of graffiti found on the walls of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, performed by a member of its IT staff. You can also browse the full dataset, including photographs of the inscriptions made available under a Creative Commons licence.

The take-home messages (as obtained with Mickey Mouse statistics)?:

  • Smiley faces outnumber sad faces.
  • References to male primary and secondary sexual characteristics outnumber those to female.
  • “Love” and “despair” appear to rise and fall in sync over the course of the academic year.
By PooterGeek | Posted in Academia, Graphics, Literature, United States | Tagged | Comments (0)

Waking Up by OneRepublic

07Feb10 – 21:58

Ryan Tedder wrote Bleeding Love for Leona Lewis and his band OneRepublic consists of friends from his church in Denver making music for people who think Coldplay are a bit too experimental. They are about as uncool as it’s possible to be without actually being David Hasselhoff.

I love their new album, Waking Up. It’s track after track of big, beautiful pop. (I use the word “pop” in its original sense of “music that is popular”, rather than in the music journalist sense of “landfill indie that’s slighty less rubbish than usual”.) Tedder has an ear for melody you can only acquire through years as a hack songsmith, lashed to a piano by The Man and made to compose for legions of dead-eyed melisma-crazed popstresses. And he himself has an extraordinary vocal range of the sort that is probably being lied about in a press release right now as extending “over five octaves”.

One Republic / All The Right Places

By PooterGeek | Posted in Fashion, Money, Music | Comments (1)

Unfortunate headlines of the day

07Feb10 – 20:57

The BBC News Website has changed its original headline:

SARAH PALIN LASHES OBAMA AT FIRST TEA PARTY CONVENTION

Palin lashes Obama

Palin lashes Obama

—bring your houseboy, and let’s party like it’s 1779!—to this one:

SARAH PALIN CONDEMNS OBAMA AT FIRST TEA PARTY CONVENTION

but, Liz Jones’s latest wibble—search for it if you like; I’m not going to link to it—retains its banner:

HONOUR KILLINGS? WHAT WE’VE DONE TO YOUNG EMMA [WATSON] IS JUST AS SHAMEFUL

Yes, she’s is referring to the highest earning actress in the World this year. According to Jones’s article, Hollywood’s paying Ms Watson fortunes to portray a “virginal schoolgirl” is in some way comparable to the Taleban throwing acid at girls who want to attend school in Afghanistan.

Where does Britain’s nuttiest columnist have left to go after this?

By PooterGeek | Posted in Afghanistan, Headlines, History, Middle Aged Woman Confused By iPod, Politics, Race, United States | Comments (3)

Bigger Than The Beatles

18Dec09 – 13:44

Lord Macca of Loch Kodak on his appearance on The X-Factor:

[Sir Paul McCartney] said he got some great reaction from people about his performance on the X Factor.

“We got great feedback on the streets the next day. It’s my claim to fame now.”

By PooterGeek | Posted in Celebrities, Music, TV | Comments (0)

Bloggertarians, Tin Foil Hat Wearers, Loons

11Nov09 – 00:16

Foes of President Barack Obama and his policies can vent their frustrations by engaging in fictional warfare, thanks to a new online strategy game with a heavy political component.

The satirical game 2011: Obama’s Coup Fails, launched last month by a group of Ron Paul supporters that call themselves The Founders, throws players into combat against the crumbling Marxist forces of Obama’s loyalist Black Tigers, the Islamic fundamentalist Nation of Malsi and The Cong — a group of deposed Democratic congressional leaders.

Playable on the United States of Earth website, the game mixes strategy, trivia questions and community elements but has no particular ax to grind with Obama, according to Mike Lodispoto, one of the game’s Libertarian founders. In fact, the next United States of Earth game will target President George W. Bush.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Politics, Tin Foil Hat Wearers, United States, Video Games, World Domination | Comments (2)

Modern Masters

16Oct09 – 21:34

Further to my rant about clueless DJs replacing proper producers, here are a couple of funny little animations about the horrors of being a mastering engineer to today’s “talent”: Mastering: The Movie Part One and Part Two.

And, from an interview this month’s Sound on Sound magazine, here’s Bruce Swedien, studio engineer for Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall and Thriller albums, on Quincy Jones, producer of the same:

“…Quincy and I first worked together with Michael Jackson on the movie The Wiz. We were living together at a hotel in Manhattan, and we would go to Studio A at A&R Studios. We had a big session at noon on Monday to record some of the music with a big 70- or 80-piece orchestra, and we had to leave for the studio at 10am. The night before, Quincy and I had guests at our hotel for dinner, and Quincy still hadn’t even started on the orchestration for the opening titles. I was getting a little nervous, but he said not to worry about it. At about four that morning, I woke up and noticed under my door that all the lights in the apartment were blazing. There’s Quincy at the dining-room table with a billion sheets of manuscript paper, and he was writing orchestrations. I said ‘Quincy, we’ve got to leave soon!’, but he just said ‘Don’t worry about it’ so I went back to bed.

“At about nine o’clock I got up again, and Quincy said to me ‘I’m all set’. There wasn’t even a piano or a guitar in the apartment; just Quincy and his manuscript paper! Off we go to the studio, and Quincy hands over his score to the copyists. He didn’t even want to conduct — he’d hired a conductor because he wanted to be in the control room with me. The conductor gave the down beat, the orchestra played the entire overture, and there was not a single note out of place. It still gives me the chills to think about it!”

[Thanks to Tom Nuttall for the video links.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Celebrities, Engineering, Humour, Music, Video | Comments (3)

National Stereotypes

15Oct09 – 23:39

I have just searched Google News for “Afghanistan”. The top three stories are, in order:

500 more British soldiers will go to Afghanistan—[report]

Italians bribed the Taleban all over Afghanistan—[report]

France will not send any more troops to Afghanistan—[report]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Afghanistan, Europe, Searches, Warfare | Comments (2)

v v good fun

13Oct09 – 23:57

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 this one video is more entertaining than the entire recorded output of The Wedding Present, and, right from the touching opening couplets, the writer(s) of the song Community Property show(s) a better grasp of scansion than Kelly Clarkson:

I would give you the stars in the sky
But they’re too far away
If you were a hooker, you’d know
I’d be happy to pay
If suddenly you were a guy
I’d be suddenly gay

Furthermore, the guitar solo in the middle is, by the genre’s standards, a model of taste and concision. Here’s Steel Panther being interviewed on the BBC News site.

Meanwhile, there are more Frankie Goes To Hollywood re-releases/remixes going on. Having heard the first of them to be released, I can believe Pop Justice when it says that the remixes of their singles/12-inches somehow sound more dated than the original tracks. It’s ten times easier today to do the stuff that Trevor Horn did with them originally back in the 80s, but most remixers and dance “producers” are hack DJs who wouldn’t know musical if it walked into their flats dressed like Lady Gaga and then strutted out with its conical bra cups stuffed with all their iPods and cocaine.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Brentian Man, Humour, Music, UK, United States, Video | Comments (1)

Statistics Is Fun

12Oct09 – 14:54

Have a look at this elegant illustration of the relative safety of one cervical cancer vaccine.

Read this intriguing blogpost about how the appointment of bean-counters at Premiership clubs might well have made league games even more exciting to watch (as well as costing bookies money).

[Thanks to Jim P.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Football, Graphics, Mathematics, Medicine | Comments (0)

Single Transferable Mope

06Oct09 – 11:28

I picked up this Prospect blogpost, via the magazine’s twitter feed, where it carried a headline that falls into the Kamm/Rentoul category of “Great Historical Questions To Which The Answer Is ‘No’.”:

“Is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam?”

The article itself doesn’t bother with the question mark, but is a classic of the “another Vietnam” genre, once so popular in commentary about allied intervention in Afghanistan (until it became comical to anyone who could read), and then popular in commentary about allied intervention in Iraq (until it became comical to anyone who could read).

Several of the usual clichés are in place: “bodybags”, “fierce” native fighters [imagine the cries of “RACISM!1!!” if someone tried that kind of thing in another context], “exit strategy”, “neocons”, and a collection of “far-away country between people of whom we know nothing” boilerplate minimizing the region’s strategic significance.

Thanks to its generic nature, I don’t have to write a fisking of the piece. I’ll just point you at one I made earlier and invite you to add Streithorst’s clumsy attempt at drawing a historical parallel to my old collection.

[It might also seem from the piece I link to that Streithorst doesn’t know how to spell “elusive”, but if we assume that he really did mean “illusive”, then it’s fair to say that “elusive” would have made more sense in the context in which he deploys it.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Afghanistan, Brentian Man, History, Language, Warfare | Comments (1)

Evans, Dear Boy, Evans

06Oct09 – 10:42

Via Paulie’s “Shared Items” feed at Never Trust a Hippy, I read on the Democratic Society Blog one of the best “Did Magna Carta die in vain?” comments ever [see foot of the post I link to] and, on Tory Troll, an account of yet another FAIL by frontline interviewers.

Here’s a tip for the meedja and the senior members of the Labour Party: everyone else didn’t go to Oxbridge; everyone else is bored of the Bullingdon Club. I was in the same place at more-or-less the same time, and I am bored of the Bullingdon Club. I admit, my being interested in policies is not typical of the general population, but at least if you work for the BBC and ask politicians about their policies then you can claim that you are doing your job and people will be less likely to wonder if you deserve your undisclosed salary.

UPDATE: Sadie offers another eyewitness account, and Simon Dyda has video.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Celebrities, History, Newspapers, Politics, TV | Comments (0)

Aussie Supporters As Gracious As Ever

09Jul09 – 13:19

One cool thing about twitter is the ability to search for a particular subject and see what people around the World are saying about it right now. This morning, as England’s tail-enders were putting on some cheeky runs, I searched for “Ashes”—which, as you’d expect, has recently become one of the most common words appearing in tweets—and this was the most recent hit:

disappointed Aussie wants to punch English people in face

disappointed Aussie wants to punch English people in face

By PooterGeek | Posted in Cricket, They Don't Like It Up 'Em | Comments (1)

Tough Audience

08Jul09 – 00:20

On being shown Michael Jackson moonwalking to Billie Jean, a friend’s seven-year-old son shrugged his shoulders and commented, unimpressed:

“Ahh… He’s got wheels in his shoes.”

[Anecdote and title stolen wholesale from JL.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Celebrities, Dance, Friends, Music | Comments (0)

The Smell Of Home

08Jul09 – 00:17

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 my attention to this lovely letter which ties together two of my most recent PooterGeek posts. It appeared on the Daily Mail Website in response to the latest comments from Bernie Ecclestone:

He’s not wrong. Hitler did get things done. Not what should have been done perhaps—and not in the way people might have wanted them done—but get things done Hitler certainly did. So did Ghengis Khan for that matter! As for Max Moseley leading Britain, could he be any worse thatn Brown or Blair, or that leader-in-waiting, Cameron-de-Pinko? Anyway—Mr Ecclestone is a billionaire—he can say what he likes, and damn what the media thinks. On balance, free speech like that is a good thing.

– Cllr Chris Cooke, Tamworth, UK, 4/7/2009

[Councillor Cooke is an Independent, who “supports” the BNP.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in History, Life, Politics, Race, Sport | Comments (0)

Making The Cars Run On Time

04Jul09 – 10:35

Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One chief, said yesterday that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and praised Adolf Hitler for his ability to “get things done”.

Mr Ecclestone endorsed the concept of a government based on tyranny.

“Politicians are too worried about elections,” he said. “We did a terrible thing when we supported the idea of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. He was the only one who could control that country. It was the same [with the Taleban]. We move into countries and we have no idea of the culture. The Americans probably thought Bosnia was a town in Miami. There are people starving in Africa and we sit back and do nothing but we get involved in things we should leave alone.”

By PooterGeek | Posted in Afghanistan, Driving, History, Iraq, Politics, Sport | Comments (1)

Son Of English Teacher Resists Using Name Of Austrian Modernist Writer In Blog Post About Interminable Bureaucratic Torment

04Jul09 – 10:35

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 classic Damian Counsell life-disaster story: because of his scrupulous chopping-off-his-nose-to-spite-his-face honesty, the Geek sentenced himself to half-a-decade of consumer hell.

The first of many bizarre facts about this dispute was that it resulted from my trying to pay the bill for my own use of their product, rather than the much lower use of another, non-resident, consumer at my premises, and from Nameless Utility Co doing its damnedest to stop me from doing so.

The last bizarre fact was that, last month, when, after all these years, an amicable agreement finally seemed to have been reached, and all that remained was for me to sign the relevant documentation authorizing payment, Nameless Utility’s representative in the negotiations (and apparently one of the few competent people in its employ)—let us call her “K”, for that was indeed her first initial—suffered an acute life-threatening viral infection that put her in a coma for a week. Nameless Utility’s replacement negotiator reviewed the relevant documents, declared that their representative had acted without proper authority, and ripped up the deal. It’s both depressing and funny that her colleagues at Nameless Utility were puzzled by my behaviour when I began my telephone calls to them by asking about her well-being.

I had to threaten legal action to get them to negotiate this new position. They returned to the table—and confirmed the original settlement. I am merely worse off now, but a hell of a lot less badly off than if I hadn’t fought my corner. K isn’t fully recovered yet, but better, thank goodness. Still, I’m not counting on this tale having reached a final resolution until I’m escorted to a quarry for execution.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Brentian Man, Law, Life, Literature, Money | Comments (6)

The Spirit Of Lord Rothermere Lives On

16Jun09 – 23:59

Every single “serious” newspaper in the UK led with Iran this morning. But The Daily Mail devoted its entire front page to an attack on Gordon Brown and the Iraq Inquiry, and The Express (alongside a photograph of a Euro Lotto winner cradling a giant cabbage) to asylum seekers, the largest group of whom before the war came from Iraq. The Mail’s inside coverage of Iran is headlined:

POLL RIOTERS RIP IRAN APART AS AHMADINEJAD ROUNDS UP OPPOSITION

What those restive Iranians need is some “sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine”.

By PooterGeek | Posted in History, Iran, Iraq, Newspapers, Politics | Comments (2)

People Of Colour

05Jun09 – 10:16

I love tie-and-dye, and used to carry books around in tie-and-dye bags that my mum made for me. It was some time before I became aware (to my discomfort) that people in the west associated it with hippies. Here’s a BBC slideshow about makers of tie-and-dye fabrics in Mali.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Africa, Family, Fashion, Photography | Comments (2)