Someone hasn't thought this through...

Saw this on my way into town the other day.

(And then I crashed into a tree *)

Surely somebody must have realised how this sign for Mole Street actually reads? I'm tempted to write to the council...

And now I need your help - if you're not doing anything today, could you pop by some of these places and send me a photo of the street sign?

Basta Rd (Lebanon)

Lala La (Connecticut)

Reta Rd (N Carolina)

Mole Station (New South Wales)

Ebo La (Illinois)


Ta muchly
- Suman -


* No trees were harmed in the making of this blog - I was on foot.

Short one

I met a MicroBiologist today.

She was 6 foot 2

Is that meant to be ironic?

Failed

Not my fault, they asked me all the wrong questions.

Public hair

I like having a beard

Granted, it's only been for a week or so, it's more of an unshavenness. But it feels nice when I stroke it and that's ALL that matters.

It's not quite the sort of beard that small children can grab onto and hang from yet. (My mate has one of those beards - he's a Moslem - and it took all the strength I could find to not pull on it whenever I saw him. That's why we stopped being friends. Honest. It wasn't anything stupid I might've said...)

The reason for my furry facial growth is that I don't like shaving. It's not that I can't do it - I don't get cuts or anything. Unlike some people, I'm not dangerous with sharp metal (go on, count the fingers - I think you'll find all twelve are there).
It's just that when I shave daily - even really carefully with one of those fancy sonic, 5-blade, laser-powered wizard razors - within two hours it looks like I haven't shaved.

For days.

Although I don't want you thinking I'm some kind of testosterone-overloaded werewolf. The rest of my body is normal (not that I've tried shaving anywhere else - what would be the point, I don't need to be quite that aerodynamic in my day-to-day life). But stubble tends to reappear on my chinny-chin-chin quite quickly. And it looks a bit rubbish.

I need to look good tomorrow - I have an entire day of intense exams, face-to-face with elite, experienced examiners who could make or break my career aspiratoins if they don't like my tie, let alone my answers. So I want to do anything I can to make a good impression. I toyed with the idea of growing a goatee, thinking it might ooze confidence. But last time I tried one, I looked more like I was oozing ooze, a bit to sleazy for an exam at the Royal College.

So I'm going to shave tomorrow morning before the first exam.
And again at lunchtime before the afternoon session.


I'm sure the examiners will be really impressed when I walk in holding a blade...

Your Revision

I didn't watch the Song Contest last night.

But I did see a bit of Finland's entry... (which was handy, seeing as they won - saved myself having to sit through the rest. Bingo). I assume the rest of the entries were the usual awful dance numbers (bad rappers / girls in short skirts which get pulled off half-way through) and dreary ballads (by boring women in long robes or men with open collar shirts) - which is probably why the ever-so-slightly different heavy-metal-monsters-with-explosions act was the one that won.

I missed it because I'm doing night shifts in Expensive Scare.... I mean Intensive Care. Scurrying between one dying person being kept alive by a machine to another, trying to keep them all going simultaneously... a bit like those old style variety acts where some bloke keeps plates spinning on top of tall poles. If that kind of thing is before your time, then you've probably never seen a ventriloquist either. Shame on you.

I've got some more exams next week and I wanted to do some revision in the evening before my shift started, so I tried to sleep during the day.

Here's a tip: if ever you want someone you haven't spoken to in ages to get in touch, all you need to do is try and sleep during the day with your phone on.

Not one... but THREE people decided that yesterday was the day to ring me out of the blue "just to say hi".

Needless to say, without a decent day's kip, I was a bit grumpy later on at work. I think I may even have been hearing voices. I swear I heard most of my unconscious, comatose patients talking to me.

All of them in fact. Except the chap in bed 9.

Come to think of it, he used to be a ventriloquist...

New diagnosis

a) "You've not got Hodgkins Lymphoma"

b) "You've got Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma"

Said a), meant to say b)...

Not the same thing apparently
Who knew, eh...?

Sore thumb

I MEAN, WHAT'S THE POINT OF AN OVEN GLOVE WHICH ISN'T HEAT-PROOF?!?!

Lunch is all over the floor.
I bet it won't taste so good now...

edit: Not too bad actually (even with the occasional CocoPop)

The most famous person I know

It's just occurred to me that I'm famous.

It's not a huge surprise - every now & then people come up to me to say: I love your songs, You're amazing, Please sign my breasts, I want to have your babies, etc... But everything was so gradual that it never really sank in that literally MILLIONS of people have heard of me. Own a piece of me even (albeit in digital form).

Last week, Sarah & I had lunch with "Imperial Hutchinson" who was team captain of Imperial Medics' University Challenge team this year. He made us get a table near the window in the hope that we'd be paparazzied and make it into Heat Magazine or something:

"Quiz Geek & Underground star spotted dining with mystery blonde..."

I let him down gently by pointing out that I am just a voice to the majority of people - hardly any of the fans know what I look like. When the London Underground Song took off, I never made it into the Evening Standard (I had to be at work during the photocall... grrr...), so the best I could do was Eastern Eye (The Voice Of Britains Asians), a weekly newspaper for brown folk. It's hardly the same thing.


Just now I sent an email to a radio presenter (if he replies, I'll tell you the full story) - he's been a broadcaster with the BBC for thirty years, hosted and been on numerous TV shows, had lots of books published, etc. But I reckon more people our age (ie young enough to use the Interweb) will have heard of me than of him.

Odd that....

So I guess the most famous person I know is Adam... meh...
(Then again, I've probably got his signature around here somewhere - better save that for eBay)

Trichobezoar

I just got my hair cut.

I don't know how long people usually leave between haircuts - I get mine clippered down to a grade 2 or 3 and then go back when it's grown into a full Afro. And that's normally 4 to 6 weeks.
(My hair grows ridiculously quickly - it's one of my superpowers) .

But if my bathroom scales are to be believed, I've lost about 700 grams of hair this time round.

I didn't collect all the hair up off the floor and take it home - that would be weird (and they'd probably get suspicious if I asked ->)

But it just so happened that I stepped on my bathroom scales this morning (which I do every few weeks, just to see if the battery's dead) and I weighed myself again when I got home before lunch.

700g? That can't be right, can it?

Maybe I'm using too much hair gel...

Fine...

I went to see Adam's new Chelsea flat at the weekend - very nice.

I drove there - only to discover that parking outside his place is 4p/minute. Yes, it would've been cheaper to phone him. So I put £7.20 in small change into the machine - I'll leave you Americans to calculate it yourself... we Brits can't go around doing everything for you or you'll never learn - I displayed my ticket stub prominently on the dashboard and headed off into his.

A couple of hours of songwriting later, I went out to the car to find on the windscreen... a yellow & black sticker! The same colours as a wasp (for a reason...)

While I'd paid plenty of money (which was painful enough), I'd parked in a bay next to the Ticket Machine for the Pay & Display spaces... which had a sign halfway down the road saying Resident Permit Holders Only. Bastards

So the Parking Nazis kindly left me a fine for a hundred bloody quid.

Ironically, a Residents Parking Permit only costs £50.


Hmmm... what rhymes with "Traffic Warden" - I feel another angry song coming on...
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By the way, the new remastered version of the CD (with extra tracks, lyrics, etc) is available again from the main website.

(Don't ask why the price has gone up...)