My journey to work this week has been, understandably, rather different from usual, consisting as it does of a bus journey, a train journey and a blagged lift from the train station off whoever is in the office when I get there, rather than a simple drive down the M56. The bus journey takes me through Hulme, a rather less-than-salubrious area of the city. Amongst the variety of frightening looking pubs, dole offices, bookies and various bits of wasteland, there’s a modelling agency. It calls itself the “Hidden Beauty Modelling Agency”.

Now, maybe I’ve missed the point, but I thought if you were after a model, hidden beauty was exactly the kind of thing you weren’t after. Outward, visible, surface beauty would surely be a far more valuable characteristic in a model, no?

“Hang on, all your models are total mingers.”
“Oh, yeah, but they’re really lovely people inside”.

People don’t really think these things through properly before acting, do they?

In other news, a baby with two heads has been born in – yes, you guessed it – America.

With all these stories flying round about organists playing the Liberty Bell March during church services, I decided to wander over and check out what the Ship of Fools (the magazine of Christian unrest) lot are up to these days; evidently, they’re going from strength to strength with their usual mixture of irreverent humour and thought provoking articles. A lot of stuff won’t make sense to non-God-bothering types, but I don’t know a single person who hasn’t laughed at the Gadgets for God section. The article about Christian holiday camps rang particularly true, and there’s a great (and more serious) article about those loony Left Behind books.

(small print: Ship of Fools is a Christian website and therefore uses words like “God”, “Jesus” and “Church” quite a lot, and contains descriptions and pictures of gratuitous and open worship and praise; if you’re easily embarassed and wouldn’t want your co-workers to see you looking at that sort of thing, I’d wait until you get home from work before looking at the website)

I know I shouldn’t find these funny, but I do. I’m sorry.

Shud txt spk B allwd in schls?

Julie, 14, Manchester – I would happily watched you being lowered into a tank of acid. Ben, 15, you are wise in the ways of the world.

Mind you, I employ the same language I use for text messages for every type of written communication, on account of how I find ‘txt spk’ deeply unreadable and offensive on the eye, and I use full and correct English in text messages. I will reword, or expand to two or more messages rather than use contractions like “gr8”.

On a similar note, a friend of mine has registered apostrophes.org, but doesn’t seem to have done anything with it yet.

This is getting nearly as predictable as Sarah‘s beer tales from last year. There’ll be a post on a different subject soon, I promise.

My orkut fortune for today told me I was going to be “fortunate in everything”. Which was good news, as today the car went for its “find out what’s wrong” MOT. It turns out that Orkut has spooky powers of premonition – it failed, but only on fairly trivial stuff; broken indicator cover, non-working brake light, blowing exhaust, etc. No mention of dodgy brakes (other than the scraping noise that’s been happening for ages and apparently isn’t worn down pads) or bearings or anything.

So, as predicted yesterday, I’m going to force it through the MOT one more time. And I’ll be getting it along to a garage to check out that noise coming from the wheel, because I still think there’s something up with one of the bearings, but we’ll see about that one when we get to it.

All in all, not so bad after all. Thank orkut for that 🙂

It’s depressing to leave the house a full hour and a half earlier than usual and still get to work after everyone else. I just know I’m going to end up snapping and paying £500 to get the damn thing through its MOT. I should maybe start saving properly for a new car so next time it explodes I don’t have to start thinking about loans and stuff…

Hark! What is that noise I hear emanating from the front wheels? Could it be a failing wheel bearing? I really bloody hope not. Maybe I should just take the hint and ditch the stupid thing.

Having just had a quick peek at my Haynes manual and a poke around under the bonnet, I’ve decided to sack off paying a garage 50quid for the privelege of replacing my indicator cover, given that I reckon a trained monkey could do it in about 5 minutes. It’s an incredibly simple job – release a single spring clip and the whole unit slides out – so, it’s just a tenner for a new indicator unit and Bob’s my mum’s brother (which would come as news to my mother, who thinks she’s an only child).