No Middle Name

Resurrection , originally uploaded by No Middle Name . And lo, on the third day didst some of the trolleys rise up from their graves and trundle away.

Across the aisle from me, is a woman with the flawless complexion of a terracotta warrior. Same burnt orange colour, same featureless, uniform texture. She looks plastered, rather than made-up. To relieve the monotony of hue, her lips are picked out in a subtle shade of neon pink. Her dyed hair is a strange purply-red colour, a little too short for the artful piling she has attempted, varnished with a stupendous amount of hairspray and buttressed with an assortment of hair grips the size of girders. For good measure, a large, green, silk orchid is glued to one side of her head. Her black uniform bulges in all the wrong places, and she stares vacantly into space. On her shirt is the name of her workplace, a beauty salon. You too could look like her, it says.

So I've converted my blog to blogger's new beta . This means the site is dynamically generated, not static, and I can add little tags or labels to each post without using Flock. Actually, Flock probably won't work anymore. Or Flickr. But I know Flickr has been fixed. I just need to sort out my settings. Which I will do in a minute. I'd hate for me not to be able to post crappy cameraphone pictures to my blog.

Motivation Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . Stupid poster.

This weekend I had to strim our garden. We're moving out of rented accommodation so we need to make everything nice and tidy. I up-ended the strimmer to replace the plastic coil of whirling cellulose disruption, and proceeded to shriek like a pansy. Nestling gently amongst the compacted, shredded lawn remnants was a redback spider . Sleek, black, pointy and kind of cool looking, it was the KITT of the spider world. But without the annoying, slightly camp voice. Seemed a shame to have to stomp it into a small smear on the garage floor,  but poisonous, potentially lethal creatures with the ability to scurry up my trouser leg have no place in my world. technorati tags: spiders , redback , gardening , carnage

Graveyard Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . Where shopping trolleys go to die.

Imagine a balloon squeezed at one end, the other end swelling and - well, ballooning. Paint a face on it and you'd have a first approximation of the guy that sat opposite me on the train the other day. He looked as if his tie was too tight. His eyes seemed to bulge, showing too much white. His face was almost purple. If he'd been frowning you would be concerned about how much fibre he was getting. Smiling beatifically, he stared at a point about two feet above my head and a foot to my right for the whole journey. It may be that his over-starched collar had forced his head into this position and he couldn't move any more. I surmised that he must be on his way to see a doctor, or perhaps a tailor.

I crush a tram Originally uploaded by No Middle Name .

Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing - lifehack.org These look interesting, but 50 is far too many for me to get around to reading. I never seem to have that much time. technorati tags: writing

subbuteo cricket Originally uploaded by iyers . For me, Wendy, and the other 3 people who watched the Kids in the Hall in the UK: I Crush Your Head .

The most beautiful woman in the world sat opposite me on the train the other morning. Eyes like polished emeralds watched the suburbs slide past. Succulent lips pouted above a delicate chin, cradled on long, elegant fingers. Her shoulder-length, blonde hair was restrained in some complicated folding arrangement the secrets of which are known only to women. The most beautiful woman in the world dozed off not long after I got on. Her head would slowly fall forwards, jerking herself awake in a glamorous, heartwrenchingly sexy way, followed by mopping up the drool from the corner of her mouth. The most beautiful woman in the world woke up a few stops from the end of the line. She ran an unpainted fingernail around the inside of her right ear, delving into the folds. The most beautiful woman in the world wiped whatever she'd excavated on the lapel of her fashionable jacket before yawning and returning to her quiet contemplation of the world. The most beautiful woman in the world lurched...