Bye bye miss American pie.

Hey! This is awkward. Typing on my new iPhone 4. Way cool, very crisp- it seems easier to hit the buttons but maybe that's just a sort of placebo effect of eating how pretty and sharp the pixels are and how much better the touch screen is apparently. But whatever. It's still got bloody predictive text so every once in a while a word I write is mistaken for snout. Which is a little annoying. Anyway, I've recently been told- not asked- by many people I know to stop blogging and to go back to writing notes on my facebook page. Apparently they used to be better. I reckon they're just too lazy to type in looserballs in a search engine. Anyway, this is probably Bon voyage for the meantime while I consider going back to facebook. If I have the time I'll try and copy/paste stuff here.

On a side note, I wa on a rail replacement bus the other day and had an Indian dude say the next stop is north greenwhich. He pronounced it green witch. Sooooooo funny. Many people on the bus couldn't help but laugh. Awe poor small Indian man. :(

Late night peep show

This is gonna have to be a short one. Its already half twelve and i have work in the morning. It's been a while so i thought I'd make an effort. Whats new with you lot? I went football on yesterday- well, technically two days ago, and all was well, same old, same old, though the air con was off and we were playing indoors. On a hot day. Not cool. Oh and to top it off, i had a burly big man kick the football with all his strength towards me while I was in goal. Fortunately, my face got in the way...

It was so bad, the game stopped and even people on his team, not only him, came up to me to apologise. Man, it hurt. But nothing compared to how bad it hurt the following morning. I had to ibuprofen my ass up and take the day off work. My nose has swollen. MY nose. Yeah, and it was a big one to start with. Boy, it's so big I'm getting back ache...

On the plus side, I got out of goal...

Aside from insulting myself though, the main reason i decided to write today was to pose you all a question. I have a mate who's been insane about his ex for, what, a year now and has been pining over her madly. Insanely, the week he finally mans up and gets eyes for someone new, out of the BLUE she texts him and asks how he is. A few texts later and he's head over heels about her, almost completely discarding the new girl he fancied. She- the ex- broke up with him for another dude. As far as he was aware, she was still with him. Or possibly not. Who knows?

Which is why he should, in my opinion, ask her if she's with anyone. Given he has feelings for her.

Unfortunately, it turns out she's not with her ex anymore. This is unfortunate because now, there's no brick wall to stop him coveting her. If she was with someone, it would be unethical of him to be sneaking around behind some dudes back talking to his girlfriend. Especially since he's been burnt by her sneaking around behind his back, you'd think he'd appreciate how much that sucks. But Now he has a cart blanche to dream away his ikkle love dreams. Which sucks because, come on... Wheres the me time?

She only recently broke up with her last boy buddy so to me he seems to be the dependable rebound texting buddy who's either a form of gratification for her, or just a temporary replacement for the conversations she's accustomed to having with her ex but he's simply getting his hopes up for nothing. And when it all come a crashin down- when she finds her feet with her next man, the consistency of her texts to him will reduce and then I'll be having to hear his bewildered moaning incessantly.

Am i wrong? Is it alright for him to get so excited? Should i just help the dude out whatever he decides?

Ahhhhh, what do you peeps know? You're on a bloody blog called looserballs for flips sake.

And now, as it turns to one, i should call it a night.

Hello

Previously, i said one of my posts was the most well travelled of the lot. Well, this one could well give it a run for it's money. There's even a bit of time skipping where we'll be going from the present to bits i wrote earlier to... Well, more of the present. Only, more recent than the older bits of the present. This has also been the most time consuming post I've written. I've contemplated writing, written, re written deleted and then done the whole process again, many times. Why, just now, I've had to re-write this whole paragraph be use my application on my iPad crashed. Wondeful.

Let's begin:

I've just come out of the bathroom, my lunch at kebabish- NEVER go to kebabish in manor park (actually, NEVER go to manor park)- has ensured me and my bathroom get close together at least twice an hour... WShing my hands, i came too close to the faucet and caused the water to splash all over the place, especially my jeans. Meaning now, having entered the living room, I'm being offered my niece's nappies. Apparantly in China, adult sized nappies are being sold for workers who live in distant, more rural parts and have to commute for hours on end to get to work in the city. I wouldn't really have put much credibility to this, had i not seen a few YouTube clips of commuters being crammed into trains at stations.

And you thought the central line was bad?

Word of warning, Ive noticed my ipads space key is being lame. De-jumble words as necessary...

But imagine that? The thought of pooing while you're sat next to someone on a train. Into a diaper. But the concept is, those trains are sooooooo packed, the people are practicallu stacked onto one another. You'd actually feel the... Bowel movements.

Classic thoughts by yours truly.

Let's go a few hours back on my short train trip home:
Im sat reclined slightly on a train home from manor park. Im using the overground for a change. It's spacious. And comfortable. Oddly. The last time i used one of these trains was on a trip to south end. Which I hope to be visiting tomorrow, as it happens. It's not often we get a heatwave in Britain. And on a weekend im not working on to boot. So hurray for the beach! Listening to "accidentally in love" from the soundtrack of shrek. Shrek 1. Im still dubious about shrek 4. One and two were fantastic, but three and that short Christmas film they did were horrid. Let's hope they go more towards matrix mocking and prince Charles slamming than they do squeezing every last dollar out of a movie franchise.

I actually got a ticket for the train today. It's a journey that begins and ends at stations where there are no barriers. So i could have jumped off scotch free... And was tempted to..........

But thats stealing. And we're trying to rebuild this economy people...

A paper ticket that was so redundant that i didn't even put it through a single barrier. There was nothing for me to actually make use of that ticket with.

Let's come back to the present:

That trip to the beach has been cancelled now. Damn having to please so many people. I know it's not the MOST appropriate use of the phrase, but bend your minds to make it work: a camel really is a horse by committee.

This app for typing on my ipad is actually kinda buggy. They need to release an update.

As much as i like work, there's a limit to how long i plan to be working in local government. I mean. It's nice and it could be seen by some as a career, but i don't see myself as a lifer... Not since they're introducing a bloody ugly uniform. UNIFORM! Im suddenly back at bloody o2.... Speaking of which im counting down the darn minutes till the white iPhone 4 comes out!!! Hopefully shipped without a signal glitch in the bottom left hand corner of the phone...

The iPhone4-
it video calls!
It records HD video!
It has a flash for the camera!
It multi tasks!
It groups your apps!
It's smexy looking!

It's just... SOMETIMES, it wont make phone calls.

More often than not if you're left handed...

Damn...
But brand loyalty and that, it'll take a much bigger cock up than a phone that doesn't make phone calls to keep the hordes away from buying needlessly and heedlessly.

I want one.

My point stands though. My local(and by that i mean sheesha joint, not pub- come on, I'm Asian) is fantastic. I go to it regularly and they treat me well. I am without a shadow of a doubt, a very loyal customer. Coffee inn, seriously, check it out. And it's because when they're at their peak, they smash it. The sheesha rocks, the T bone steak is tender, oozing with gravey, the home made chips are soft, fluffy, the cakes, they even do 'dud pattee' an asian tea with loads of milk and a tea bag. No watery crap. Good stuff. And even when the sheesha is rough and tastes like coal, even when the t bone is well done rather than rare, when the portions of chops are meagre and the dud pattee is more... Pg tips... I like it better than any other place.

I was at the local today actually, and had a great experience. I've been listening to music really loudly on my bose (tm) (boo yah!) headphones and yeah, its cool. But im deaf. Almost. And I've sort of devised this way of mixing up lip reading and listening carefully. Being deaf doesn't really help when your talking to customers and trying to listen to their problems about abuse at home and needs for council tax.

"WHAT?! Your husband hit you with a WHAT?! A gardening fork? WHAT??"

no no no no no. Not acceptable.

Worse though, (and it IS worse than embarrassing a customer when you jeopardise your sheesha) was today at coffee inn. The dude made us what was possibly the best sheesha ever. Nuances is the word i would use to describe how the three different flavours were enveloped about one another. Fantastic. Though inevitably as the coal sits on top for any period of time, the flavour becomes harsher. The guy who was with us told us that blowing in, rather than sucking would remedy that. So i did. When he said don't blow harder, i only just heard- but didn't make out the "don't", looked up to do my combo of lip reading and listening to make out the "blow harder".

And so i did. I huffed and i puffed with ALL my might...! And kinda broke the sheesha. Liquid oozed out from the top, the coal on top kinda bounced and fell off the tray and every one else in the room looked up in silence...

Oh crap....

The guy, obviously quite taken aback by my.... I'll admit it, retardedness, shook his head and fixed me up another one.


So, so nice.

I also have this really weird habit of trying to sop from local shops as much as I can instead of going to bigger businesses. Keep the big man at bay and help out the little guy. And that's why i try to go to these Easter European/ algerian coffee shops that have sprouted along the high street instead of starbucks evilness. I used the same altruistic (yes, altrustic- i could save a bucket load going to bigger supermarkets!) approach when i walked past this kinda run down dime-store barber that's near my house. Ok admittedly, I'd pay MORE for a Toni and guy haircut, but that's by the by. The last time i went to a salon they gave me a fringe. Or at least tried to. For flips sake, im BALDING! The place i DONT have hair is in the bloody fringe region!

So i didn't risk him giving me an "awesome" hair style; "blade one on the side and two on top, blend it if you feel up to the task with a 1.5 in the middle, no biggie if you can't"..

Or so i told him. The dude smashed it up. Bladed all over the sides, line in my hair, all the bells and whistles. I was so proud of his work, i let him shave me. And that too, with expert precision, towards the end he was intricately chissling off individual hair around my line. I couldn't help but smle with the expertise he showed. But he told me not to. It was messing up his shave...

I go to him so often that i think im actually the person who's keeping his business afloat...

So good customer service is a must in the business world.

So there you have it, my note that breaks my silence. Hope you all enjoyed it/ used it as an excuse to distract yourselves from work.. It bloody took up all my evening/ my journey home on the train...

SketchUp.

I've been mucking about again on this 3d modelling program. I should upload the 3d model sometime soon actually, but as it stands, here's a (2 dimensional) snapshot of... my desk, my computer, my bed (with half it's legs chopped off for now- it's not really that short) my window frame and some of the bricks outside.

(Click it to see it larger)
I'm hoping to have the whole house done, maybe then I'll pop it up in 3d and post it up for the world to see. Sort of like a high tech, low budget cribs.

Thanks for your comment Babor, means a lot.

Targets

This is probably my most well travelled blog post. I started writing it at work, then on the a13 and now in the hospital.

No, I'm not in the hospital because i was blogging while on the a 13, i was in a cab back then. At work, there's a catch 22. A horrible clash of performance and funding. We need to be well staffed to perform well, though the better we perform, the less the higher ups want to give us more staff. Why would they? If we perform well. Unfortunately, we don't. In fact, we fudge the books a little here and there. To make us seem better. Which inadvertently leads us to performing even worse since the impacts the aforementioned staffing issue. As such, we stagnate in a downwards spiralling toilet flush.

Wow, thats bleak imagery for work since im kinda loving it right now. But that's here and there. It doesn't change that changing figures is wrong and leads to people being done wrong. Not very obvious when it's done at my work place. All it makes at worst is people getting annoyed at having to wait to be seen by one of us. Big deal.

This culture of target driven work and such is applied across the board though. So what happens if the government legislate that patients who are diagnosed with cancer must receive treatment within x number of days after diagnosis? Well, then you just get doctors who delay giving patients scans so that the cancer isn't discovered until a later date so that they don't have such stringent workloads and tight deadlines.

So as i sit here, next to my mum who only got her ct scan by a miraculous mistake/novice doctor, I cant help but feel a little jaded. Had we not been told by our doctor to assume this was a minor stroke, we wouldn't have been prompted to send her to the hospital earlier the following day when she was feeling slightly unwell. Otherwise, we would have been waiting till the day after tomorrow for a ct scan. Just thinking that my mum would be sitting worrying at home uncertain about what was wrong with her while she had a lesion and excess fluid in her brain..? We've become quite pessimistic in this family, we're quite sure the doctors assumed cancer before they ran the tests to confirm. Vis a vis aformentioned doctor facts.

My brother and i spoke about things like this while he was down last week, in the run up to my mother's hospitalisation. While we were witnessing her deteriorating health and being pushed around by doctors who were laughably insisting it could be due to high blood sugar.

Imagine you run a pharmaceutical company and make billions on selling a drug. And you come up with a drug that works better and cures diseases amazingly quickly. Do you stop selling your current drug, which isn't as effective but sells bucket loads and makes you rich, start selling the new one which makes you less money?

Or do you withhold your new medicine and make loads of money???

Visiting hours are over now.

Shannanigans

Mcdonalds do a frequent coffee buyer card that comes attached to it's cardboard cups. You buy six coffees you collect the stickers on one of the cards and you get the seventh one free. I've never really collected them, i just hand the stickers over to my colleague who collects them religiously. I've come to realise that I'm not doing myself any favours by turning my nose up at the sticker scheme. You see, to my latest calculation based on my average consumption of coffee, ive missed out on roughly 7.5 billion free cups of coffee. Give or take. It's that hard to stay awake at work after a night out celebrating one of kris' birthdays.

Which are always a blast. Last time i had one, my mate passed out and had to have my assistance in order to, i hate to admit, change his clothes. They were covered in vomit. Of another person.

That's how you can tell you've had one hell of a night.

My iPad auto corrects hell for he'll. Which can be annoying.

Anyway, that year, my friend abdul tried putting his trousers on by pulling them over his head.
This was not conducive to his goal.

As you can imagine, taking his shoes off, what with the delicate task of untying shoe laces, didn't prove to be too easy.

Last nights party was good, no Abdul- sadly last years endeavour was a lesson to him. As for work the following day...

Funnily enough it was the day the people at work decided I could shadow some of the officers while doing some of the more difficult tasks. Something I'd been looking to do from day dot.

And here I am trying hard at 8.45 to stay awake and look all prim and proper, trying hard not to sway back and forth. And the dude i was meant to shadow didn't show.

Sucks.

Major suckage.

Suckage on a colossal scale. Mucho sucko.

Oh and when i get home, after two days of work seperated by 3 hours of sleep and 5 hours of partying, I realize I've left my house keys in my other trousers. So i whip out my phone to call someone since no ones answering the door. Turns out the families left london for the day. And night.

Long story short, i essentially had to break into my house. I've attempted this twice before and only today, in broad daylight for the first time and also, in a more sound state of mind, i actually managed to breK in. Oddly enough, two police officers walked right past me.

They were women though, so what can you expect?

It's slightly disconcerting how easily i managed to do it though.

Im currently reading bram stokers Dracula on my iPad. It's funny that i should read a chapter where they were discussing breaking into a house suspected to be owned by Dracula and van Helsing insists that they should do it during the daylight hours so as to remain as inconspicuous as possible. No one would expect it.



Also, on a note about Dracula. I love it. Such a fantastic method of narrative. And yet fully immersive for the reader. I feel at least.

Having seen a few film renditions of it, not enough is made of the character of dr Seward in my opinion. I understand that he's not got the most romantic and dizzyingly interesting role, but with regards to documenting the whole story, he's practically the spine of the whole story. If I were to write a screenplay based on the book I'd revolve it around the suitors of Mina and mainly on dr Seward. I find the Harkers' diary entries rather.... Drab. Save for Johnothan's first journal based in the castle of Dracula. That's amazing.


Ah, im in desperate need of sleep. My well concealed prejudices are shining through.

Turkish baths.

Firstly, let me say to babz who commented on my last post... Wanker.

Secondly, what awesome weather!! I just got home from the park after a kick about with a mate. I seem to have spazticated my foot. So i sat down in the bath and tried to do a sort of massage on it. Im not as good as the dude who gave me my turkish massage in turkey. More on that later. Im typing on my iPad. Im offended that it auto corrects iPad to get a capital p but doesn't give turkish a capital t. Lame. And racist. Let's try Jew. Oh look at that. Auto corrected. How about Israeli? Oh fan frickin tastic.!

But I love my little ipad baby, wouldn't let anything happen to it for the world. Speaking of which, only a fey hours till England (auto corrected) get their first world cup match! We've not done too well against the USA (auto corrected) the last two times we played them. A draw last time and we got defeated the time before. Now i bring up england as a segway into a rant about the daily mirror. An interview with Wayne rooney(not auto corrected) revealed that he intends to win the world cup for britains REAL heros. Our soldiers. Right. Well, Coupled with the actual likely hood that England get anywhere near winning the world cup, and that a fair few of the soldiers of Britain aren't even English vis a vis possibly not too keen on old rivals england winning... I don't see that promise meaning much.

Also, the darn racist evil, annoying, filth on paper daily mail held a ballot asking if "terrorist" Zakir Naik should be allowed to enter the uk(not auto corrected). WTF?!

I like Zakir Naik. He's special to me. And awesome clever.

I can't move my right foot at all. I think i might have possibly done more harm than good in my bath. I can wriggle my toes. But thats it. Damn. Those turkish baths. Let me start by saying, if you don't know me, I should tell you im hairy. But not where you'd think it ok. No in fact I'm also balding. The two don't go well together. So my body hair is kinda, well, it's all encompassing. Sadly. But I'm cool with it. So i decide, yeah, we're in turkey(not auto corrected), so we should have a turkish bath. Off we go. It's a nice building, the receptionist was actually from new Zealand she had a strong accent and looked oriental. So hot. Perhaps it was just hearing the accent and being able to speak normally rather than screaming at people to make them understand what i was trying to say. Oddly the baths are all underground, you have to walk down this steep set of stairs upon entering the building. We went for the premium service. Unfortunately none of the services, no matter how much you'd pay, would get you massaged by a woman. Unless your a woman.

One thing i didn't get was that women got to go into a private section where no one saw anything but guys got undressed, wrapped themselves into towels and had to walk right past the entrance in the midst of women at reception. Which is embarrassing when there are many fit women along with the fit new zealander(not auto corrected). So inn we go into the men only section, and boy. Boy oh boy. So much heat it's hard to breathe. It was amazing. You begin sweating out from all over in the minute. I think i lost a few pounds. It was a little weird at first going with my brother in law but in retrospect, i think you really need to do that whole thing with someone with you who you can talk to. I imagine it would be a whole lot more embarrassing alone.

Then we were ushered into a different room where we were washed. Scrubed would be a better word. Vigourously. There was much scrubbing. And a little bit of massaging. Then again dragged out into another room where we were sat by a faucet and our heads were washed and shampooed. Finally we were brought to the massage rooms where we were placed on bed and given a full body massage. The guy massaging me did all sorts of weird things that made odd parts of my body move. On a side note me and my brother in law had bee nodding this phone jacker impersonation where half way rough talking to a person we'd start making a strange noise that, in spelling would look something like 'peww'. So here i am, head down getting massaged next to my brother in law and i get the funny idea of doing it. So this dude massaging me hears me make this odd noise and it's clear he's confused because he stops for a second. I begin giggling and know my brother in law is too. I try for a second time but as im doing it, my massues isn't having any of it and digs is hand into my leg hard and my peww comes out as more of a 'pee-argh ah ah ah!!'

And later as he massaging my front he starts tugging at parts of my body hair and saying what's this? So so mean.

And the massage ends. He asks how it was. I say great and thank him, explaining I'm feeling all kinds of limber now. He says, 'wait till tomorrow, you'll feel like...' and pauses trying to think of a super hero.

'...tarzan'.

The dude at work talking about implants at work was at it again. I think if i ever, ever, ever decide to get it done, I'd ask if they can take hair from my body. Kill two birds with one hairy stone...

My dad was taking pictures in turkey and after my constant nagging got me in some of them. He said though, why go to a country like turkey full of historical buildings and take pictures of yourself? I said, hang on, that's what you're MEANT to do. If you just wanted pictures of turkey, you could just google earth it!
Anyway, we took this one and i reckon it's a good compromise on both our parts.

Anyway, I'm done. Comment, I like hearing from you!