Praise the Lord!

I think that being unemployed and desperate is starting to take it's toll on me.

Yesterday I was at home with my aunt doing the usual job application crap, when my phone rang. It was my cousin, calling for a quick chat.

Just as I picked up the phone there was a knock at the door so, cradling my phone in the crook of my neck I wandered downstairs and opened the door.

On my doorstep were 2 gorgeous Chinese girls! It felt like a bad porn movie plot. As I was on the phone I sort of said "erm hang on" to no-one in particular.

At that point, my aunt emerges from the kitchen and when I notice that the girls have a bible in their hands I figured that I'd let my aunt deal with the situation while I carried on on the phone. I figured she'd know what to do.

So I rushed off to the living room, finished up my phone call as hurriedly as possible, saying "Hurry up I've gotta go!" a number of times, and about 30 seconds after the knock I ran back to the door to find that my Aunt had sent them away!

Flinging the door open, I looked either way down the corridor and they were nowhere to be seen, vanished like smoke in the wind.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?" I shrieked

"Oh, they were Chinese" She said, "I didn't understand a word they were saying and anyway I think they wanted to talk about God..."

I tell ya that was the first time I've ever run after Jehovah Witnesses!

COME BACK! JUST TELL ME ABOUT GOD! I'LL DO ANYTHING!

DON'T read Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore!

I was reading pocketbook 2 on the train home yesterday and it's so good I completely forgot I was on a train, missed my station and ended up getting home an hour late.

There you've been warned.

...and representing the US

I'm handsome apparently!

I put a rather excited comment on the pic of me that I found on flickr saying that it was me and I got this back...

Is it? You're handsome!

Cripes, it's good to see that dancing around in my underpants hasn't done me any lasting damage!

Notting Hill Carnival #2

It's me again!

Notting Hill Carnival 2007

It's me!

Dancing in my pants and a horrible ending

What a strange carnival this year was.

A little background before I begin. As some of you know, I've been heavily involved with the Notting Hill Carnival for a while and I've been going since I was 8, nearly 20 years now. In 2002 I started volunteering with a carnival group and making costumes.

Since Ken Livingstone came in, it seems he has done his level best to try and disrupt carnival, cutting funding and setting up his own rival to carnival last year, after the official bodies, NHMBA and the British Association of Steelpans turned down his "generous" offer to move carnival away from it's traditional home in Notting Hill to Hyde Park. Apparently he offered the organisers funding of £120,000, where it actually costs over £300,00 to run carnival. That money has now been taken by the steelbands association and panorama, the pre-carnival Steelpan showcase was held in Hyde Park this year for the first time.

Anyway, enough of that.

As a result of Red Ken's delightful insight into carnival reform, he's cut funding all over the place, which has closed a lot of the carnival bands down and forced the remaining bands to group together. If a band wanted to go on the road they would have to contact a band with a license and team up and as a result we've been touring with Hibiscus Dance troupe for the last three years or so and this year we accepted a few extra contracts from a band from Guadeloupe and an elderly support association, for whom we agreed to build a float, which was to be a 40ft boat mounted on a lorry.

Unfortunately things started to go very wrong in the build-up to carnival and for reasons I won't go into the float ended up being built WAY too late, and we were building on the road to the judging point, which no-one was very happy about at all.

Worst of all, I volunteered to help out on the boat project, so I got next to no sleep for the three days leading up to carnival Monday and completely missed Sunday's carnival day, banging together wood.

As a result, we hit the road late and I got my costume just before the judging point.

Thing is, I had been so busy with the boat project that I hadn't had time to choose my costume, so I just said I'd dance in the Arts and Culture section.



Now if you look very closely at the picture you'll see that this section costume has very little on, other than a bra and blue pants.

Being that busy, this minor detail had escaped my attention, so minutes from the judging point, my mate Arto thrusts this bag in my hand and says "I hope you've got some shorts"

With no time for decisions and no facepaint I had to bite the bullet and whipped my trousers off with the cameras flashing all over the place and put on the aquamarine vest top and bikini shaped bollock strap and proceeded to dance all the way to Ladbroke Grove in my Y-fronts!

As soon as I get pictures, I'll post them right here.

Anyway, carnival ended on Sunday on sour note.

After at least 3 hours of dancing and fun, I had cramp everywhere and decided to get on board the minibus to have a rest.

After adjusting my pants, I looked out the window and saw a gang of black kids running through the crowds knocking people over. They were steaming the crowd, running through, knocking people over and beating people on the way through, probably mugging people too.

Within seconds there were police all over the place, but with a gang numbering almost 30 they only managed to pin down 2 of them and then bottles started flying at them.

It was really scary.

Within minutes there was chaos as loads of gangs started running through the crowds and the police quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer scale of people running through the crowds.

I was seeing someone getting arrested or fighting with police or each other every couple of minutes from the minibus and the whole thing had a feeling of being surrounded by chaos. Police were being attacked and I saw a guy brandishing a broken bottle at one point too.

The BBC news coverage was surprisingly positive after 2 shootings, 1 stabbing and a death so I felt compelled to write this to give the other side as a seasoned veteran of carnival.

Ignore the stats that they regurgitate every year about this being relatively crime-free. This was the worst carnival I've been to yet bar none.

Fibreglass - the clue's in the name...

I've been working on the King costume this last two days and one of the main parts is a fibreglass bulldog, representing Britain. I have never had to work with fibreglass before and for some reason it hadn't occurred to me that fibreglass might have some properties of glass.

Like the fact that it IS glass.

That goes some way to explaining why I have glass splinters in my hands tonight then...

Perfect day

I'm putting most things off until after carnival, but I just HAD to report on a perfect day.

I woke up this morning glowing from having worked on the costume that won "best young male" at the gala yesterday then I pick up the paper and there's this article about Captain Dan, the Demon Dwarf who's superglued his cock to a vacuum cleaner "after misreading instructions"!

'It was the most embarrassing moment of my life,' he explained. 'When I got wheeled into a packed A&E on a wheelchair with a Hoover attached to my willie, I just wished the ground could swallow me up.'

Today I come home to microwave curry and then I'm off to finish off work on a fibreglass dog in preparation for next weekend.

Perfect.

It's carnival season!

I finally got around to going to see my crew the Yaa Asantewaa Carnival Arts Group yesterday for preparation for this years Notting Hill Carnival.

It's just the best time of the year, everyone sitting around drinking and sticking sequins on stuff and painting and stuff.

The Carnival Gala, the showcase of all the costumes goes down in Alexandra Palace on Saturday and Sunday so it looks like as of Friday I'll be deep down in this.

Carnival proper takes place next weekend.

See you on the other side...

Stairway to Pakistan

I had an interview with a millionaire businessman yesterday for a tutoring job in Pakistan.

Having spent the whole night awake putting up my new e-learning site for a side-project I've got going on, I was a little reluctant to haul my arse out of bed for the midday interview, and even after Caz talked me into going to it I was a little dozy in the head area.

Procrastinating as I always do before interviews, I ended up leaving just enough time to get from my house to the centre of town with no margin for error.

Pretty bloody obvious that error was going to spring up then.

On the way to the station I have to cross a bridge and, being away with the fairies as I was, I managed to fall down the bloody stairs on on the way down the other side, twisting my ankle in the process and nearly passing out next to the ticket machine.

Obviously this meant that I missed my train and hobbled in half an hour late.

Anyway, the job will entail tutoring 2 kids, getting my own flat, flights, car and driver, a boatload of money and living in Pakistan. Hmmmm not bad.

The other choice I have at the moment would be to live in Switzerland at the base of the Alps and teach in a little school there.

Or I could stay here in the UK and leave teaching altogether. Decisions decisions.

Clearblue

According to the latest advert for Clearblue pregnancy tests on TV

Clearblue is the most advanced piece of technology you'll ever pee on

Obviously the makers have overlooked the fact that I took a shit on my Casio Exilim last month.

Tasty

It seems that a coalition of charities want the advertising of baby milk to be treated like tobacco advertising and vilified.

It's about time too.

I've been hooked on babymilk for years thanks to all the evil SMA adverts and after much effort, have only recently managed to wean myself onto breast milk and it's much better.

The story of Sally500

I've been meaning to post this one for a while, but I know it will result in me getting my arse kicked. I've been holding this one back for a while but I couldn't resist any longer. Even HE doesn't know about it.

So, working on the assumption that no-one actually reads my blog, except Andrew Hoang, looking to see if I've slagged him off again and Caz, who I've already told this story too, I'm gonna reveal today why my second email address is called Sally500.

A few years back, 1998at school Me, Pete and Rob used to hang out. We were geeky, still are really, Pete into Star Trek, me into comics and Rob into Photography and most other things. It was a good time and we were good friends at school.

Come 1998, we headed off in our different directions. Peter went to university, Rob went to another uni and I took a year off.

I working mainly for Natwest. Rob decided to go straight in and get stuck into uni and disappeared off the face of the Earth.

Peter announced that he had no intention of making new friends at uni cos he would just continue to hang out with his old mates.

After a few months it started to become clear that this wasn't going to work.

I was working all day, then when I got home Pete would ring me. At first it was quite cool, but it niggled that, he was going to university and not talking to anyone, going straight home and watching Star Trek and ringing me. But I thought, hell that's what it was like at school, this is what he's like, he's never gonna change.

After a few months, this started to actually interfere with my life. Pete was calling every evening. I was coming home tired or drunk after work and all I'd want to do is sit there with a good comic and veg.

Soon, he was ringing 3 times a day, at home and at work and I thought, enough is enough. After skirting the issue, asking him directly to get out there and go make some friends and hinting that maybe he should be at uni more, I snapped and gave it to him straight.

Basically I told him to sod off and not ring me ever again.

I'm not a total bastard honestly, I just wanted him to go out and make the most of his university years. Yeah alright I wanted him off my back too, but more importantly he was wasting his fresher year.

After a few weeks I started to wonder. Had I been too harsh? I stuck to my guns.

Then I started to wonder if he WAS actually going out and getting a life. So I tried to think how I could track him, ya know, without throwing him a line or giving him a chance to fall back into bad habits and I came up with this idea on the train which made me laugh out loud.

When I got home that day I opened an email account on altavista, which has sadly expired now.

Remember those were the days when, if you got an email from a mystery girl you thought it was rather nice not like now where you'd just sling it in the junk.

"Hi Peter" went my first email, "I've seen you around **** University and I think you're rather nice. Just thought I'd say hello by email cos I'm really shy, and haven't got the courage to talk to you in person, but I'm watching you.

Love Sally Gaafgnfgjakf"

Unbelievably he replied!

Soon, like any man would, he wanted to do the gentlemanly thing and coax her out of her shell, no doubt for his own disgusting carnal purposes.

He started to report back with what he had done that day etc etc. Mission accomplished!

Soon, he wanted to meet "her" and she talked him into going to a number of bars and coffee shops around town. Determined to force this shrinking violet to bloom, Peter dutifully went to most of these meets and reported back his disappointment that Sally had not been forthcoming.

Strange that given that she didn't exist.

As time went on, he started to go to bars anyway and started to talk to people. I like to think that he did so, looking for Sally. In doing so Peter started to make real friends, reported back and the communications soon dried up.

The final email was an ultimatum, telling Sally to finally reveal herself or forever lose him! Sally replied with a time and place, and Pete made his last coffee shop trek before forever breaking contact.

I saw him a few years later and asked what happened after that day.

Apparently, some psycho bitch started stalking him. I wouldn't know anything about that would I?

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.........

Oh dear, look who's lacking a sense of humour

*sigh*

It's a sad fact that not everyone in the world is endowed ability to understand the more subtle elements of humour.

I poked the other Andrew Hoang on facebook yesterday, just to see what he was like but he turns out to be a rather unpleasant type. Here's his immediate response on facebook. Doesn't he sound like an obnoxious prick, lacking a sense of humour...?

Fucking Kill me? "Bollucks" Fucking kill Yourself. Obviously you weren't meant to continue the name you fucking wanker. When i say wanker I'm referring to the same no talent ass clown Beckham. His pathetic introduction to the U.S. reminds me of the u.s.'s dominance to your crumpet loving fagot ville. Hey if you want a website start Andrew Hoang ACME and stop bitching. It's not my fault your completely unoriginal and have to search something like your name on Google. Get a fucking life. Start a fucking real website. Something other than your name. Your blog by the way is pathetic and a total shame to anyone who claims the name. Kill yourself in sublimely idiotic fashion. fuck you.

**all opinions or comments posted by andrew hoang and or the andrew hoang street team do not necessarily reflect the true opinions or feelings of andrew hoang and or the andrew hoang street team

All in response to a poke.

Sad huh.

P.S. I'd like to congratulate David Beckham for taking advantage of the Americans, going in there and taking all the cash despite being way past his prime. And they fell for it! Hahaha!

Osamu Tezuka

If you've spoken to me lately you'll know that I am getting totally obsessed with the Japanese "God of Manga", the late Osamu Tezuka, having just read the amazing 8 volume manga "Buddha"

Tezuka initially trained as a doctor but also drew his first professional manga at 17.

Thereafter his output was prolific and he is credited with, among other things, pioneering the famous huge manga eyes that we all know and love and his complete works span more than 700 manga books and over 80,000 pages.

He later went on to use his medical knowledge as the basis for one of his best known characters, Dr. Black Jack, a renegade surgeon of incredible skill

The artist of life with godlike scalpel skills. The surgeon who the era has yearned for

Black Jack is the type of surgeon that Tezuka would have been, unorthodox and pioneering but incredibly skilled. Endowed with excellent surgical technique, Black Jack always miraculously saves seriously ill patients and those on the verge of death. But he always claims an outrageous price for his surgery, which is why his presence is rejected in medical circles.



Among Black Jack's many medical accomplishments are full-body skin grafts, arm transplants, brain transplants, fingerprint transplants, grafting two people together to share one heart, extracting full-body parasites, operating at lightning speed, operating blind, operating in space, operating on a dozen patients at once, operating on dogs, cats, deer, bears, monkeys, birds, whales, aliens, ghosts, mummies, plants and computers, and removing a parasitic worm from his own intestines while under assault by a pack of wild dingos.

Most of his books contain a moral somewhere, and in a review of Volume 1 of the printed editions the g-line says this

The first volume of the series can be exemplified in the first story: a dissolute young man almost gets himself killed, and Black Jack is compelled to save his life. Unfortunately, the only way the young man can be saved is by transplanting his organs. The boy's rich father ordered a young tailor's life to be destroyed, and offers up the young fellow for the operation. Black Jack, disgusted by the duplicity, operates -- but switches the faces of the two, leaving the innocent man with the wastrel's face and setting him free. So Black Jack does in his own way play God, but only because everyone else appears to have absconded from the playing field.

The books are bloody hard to get hold of but I'm working on it, and I've just been given a link to some of the Black Jack videos that were made by the company that he set up, Mushi productions, which connoisseurs may know produced Kimba the lion, which was totally plagiarised by Disney for the Lion King.

If you're at work and the boss isn't in, check out some Tezuka right now. Maybe start with the story of Toriton or maybe even episodes 1&2.

Long live Tezuka!

Read the Skunk and for once have some sympathy for the Kuwaitis

It's about time I added Skunk to the sidebar of this blog. I've been reading his blog for a while after stumbling across it looking for info on the teacher who was banned from travelling for giving a kid a detention and have been hooked ever since.

But he's excelled himself today on the 17th anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Check his blog out now!

Famous in Madrid part 2: Assault and it's MY FAULT! - Take 2

It seems that my very existence is causing mini-Isagagenius issues in Madrid.

Before taking off to Taiwan, he was walking around fnac, a big department store type place in Madrid "when a strange dude came by"

After the insanity of the last story I was a little worried. You never quite know where his stories are gonna go.

"Well this guy was asking me if I was a VIETNAMESE and I asked why," he goes on "and he said it was because"

At this point I had to interrupt. In 6 months in Madrid I had not seen or heard a single Vietnamese person. This time it had to be me

...didn't it?

"...he wanted to skin a person called Alejandro Huang"

Oh. On second thoughts maybe it wasn't me.

He asked the guy if he meant ANDREW HOANG, "...and he nearly shaked his head off."

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight......

"And then i asked why and then he became outraged" he goes on.

I'm shitting it by this point.

"and holds my tintin shirt collar(the son of a bitch tore it off in front of everyone) and said that that you dishonoured him"

Wasn't me guv. It was the Andrew Hoang Street Team. Or Alejandro Huang. Why do people with my name have to keep going around causing trouble...

Apparently the guy was a tattooed South American skinhead, who smelt of cheap liquor. He was from Santo Domingo and was wearing an "Amo Cubo" cap on his head. If you see him tell him that I go to the University of Oklahoma and that guns are legal in the states. Trust me you'll be doing me a favour.

"So," I said, "You were attacked by a psycho in the middle of fnac?"

"Yeah," he replied "like...looking for you"

The guy then showed mini-Isagagenius a picture of me surrounded by some girls and said "that you took his girl and went to bed with her"

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Given my rather legendary track record, most of you will know that this is the most unlikely statement ever to be made by anyone.

Ever.

He also mentioned an incident where I had asked him if he was South American and if he had ever been kidnapped.

If I go missing for any length of time then, you know where to find me.

Famous in Madrid part 2: Assault and it's MY FAULT!

Oh god he's started another one! I'm gonna have to get back to this in a second....

Famous in Madrid part 2

Oh god.

I'm on the msn to mini-Isagagenius and he's telling me a SECOND story about my widespread fame in Madrid.

Watch this space...

Fables

If you've not started reading Bill Willinghams Fables yet what are you doing with your life?!

I'm on issue 39 and I am dribbling in adoration!

Check out the Pulse for commentary on issue 39

DAMMIT! I'm going to have to kill him aren't I...?

I'm fucked off. REALLY fucked off. Let me explain...

Like many people who own a blog I'm utterly obsessed with myself and regularly look up my name in google only to find that I'm nowhere near the bloody top of the pile, a fact that shouldn't surprise me given that I blog under a pseudonym. Yet for some reason I feel I deserve to be.

Instead I have been pipped to the title by Andy Hoang, Money Launderer and fugitive, Andy Hoang, a San Francisco taxi driver who didn't renew his license and some other twat (more of which to follow)

So I'm online talking to one of my friends in Madrid who's dad owns a great Japanese restaurant in the centre of town.

"You are becoming famous in Janatomo" he says "Really famous"

"Right yeah," I said, "The chef did say hello last time I was in" totally not expecting what was coming next.

Remember this kid is Japanese.

"I'll explain myself" he goes on, "Firstly there was a guy that said if I was a relative of a Vietnamese"

Right

"I asked why and he say because i looked alike a person in internet called andy hoang!"

HUH!?!

"...and he said he was a fan of..."

By this point I had my jaw on the floor and working on peeling it off.

"...andrew street "something""

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!

"wait.."

"got it in my agenda"

"andrew hoang street team"

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

I swear if I ever meet this guy I am going to fucking kill him. For once I thought that somebody actually READ this thing!