No Middle Name

A later train than usual. Mostly full, but I see several empty seats clustered together. I sit down next to a skinny man, who is wearing denims and is hunched over the freebie newspaper. There are a couple of other empty seats near us, but people are standing. The man's jeans are dirty enough to have become shiny in parts. The skin on his hands and neck is papery, blotchy, abraded in strange places. His hair is cut very short and is either naturally a faded ginger colour, or the man smokes a lot and has white hair. We sit next to each other for a few more stops. Nobody sits in the seats opposite. He carefully folds his newspaper, then puts it in his holdall before getting off at his stop. He leaves behind a slightly sickly, persistent smell and a fly which will not leave me alone.

David Blaine embarks on his most ambitious stunt ever . The renowned magician will today attempt to fold himself into his rectum, vanishing forever with a slight grunt. "It's the trick I've been training for", said Blaine through a megaphone standing on a street corner, shouting at anyone who was unfortunate to be passing by. "Look at me! Look at me!", he added. Reaction to the news has been overwhelming: "Thank fuck for that", said Milton Armtwistle, society burglar; "Twat", enthused Devon McCreamy, lady-adventurer; "Didn't he do that before?", enquired Lennon McCartney, 57, a retired hamster sexer.

Today I cast aside all pretence at normality and wore my geekdom in public. I watched the first episode of season 6 of Smallville on my phone on the train. A double-whammy of nerdhood - firstly, that I watch Smallville at all; secondly, that I like it enough to work out how to get it onto my phone to watch; thirdly, that I have a phone capable of playing video. Ok, so that's a triple-whammy, but considering that neither you nor I would recognise a whammy if it ran up and bit us on the bum, you can bloody well stop being so pedantic. Anyway, this season looks promising. There's a nice setup for some super-baddies to appear in later episodes, Jimmy Olsen has turned up, and things might actually happen this season. Then again, I have said that at the start of every season, and for the first four seasons of monster-of-the-week episodes that ended with Clark making big cow eyes at Lana but not doing anything I was proven wrong. Season 5 broke the mould by having things happen that w...

My workplace , originally uploaded by No Middle Name . My workplace has The Empire Strikes Back on the telly in the kitchen. Beat that Bloomberg. (that's Chewbacca holding c3p0's head in his hands, by the way)