A pain in the nuts

I've been indulging in one of my favourite pastimes, fondling my genitalia.

A few days ago, I started getting a weird feeling somewhere in the viscinity of my right testicle. I hoped it would sort itself out, but it hasn't, so I've got to go and see a doctor.

I'm worried that it might be cancer, and that it may result in either one or both of my bollocks being removed. And that it may also have spread to other parts of me.

My response to this threat was immediate and dramatic!

I got drunk. And smoked lots of cigarettes. And obsessively played computer games.

Anything except think about it really. True to form.

So, I have a funny feeling in my right nut. It's not actually a pain as such. It's a sense of discomfort. Things don't feel any different in the egg itself, although some of the soft tissue between it and my perineum feels slightly swollen.*

It could be some kind of infection, treatable with antibiotics. It could even be psychosomatic. My body coming out in sympathy with my dad, who has cancer of his prostate and possibly some of his lymph nodes. Or it could be some kind of bruising, although that doesn't really fit. It would be getting better if it was bruising.

So, off to let the doctor have a good grope of my balls. I doubt if I'll find out anything today.



*You know how words sometimes look wrong? - that's just happened with "swollen". It bucks the usual rule about a single consonant following a long vowel and a consonant pair following a short vowel - pipped, piped, etc

Michael Foot RIP

Michael Foot, Labour's most disastrous leader, marched for peace all his life. Tony Blair, Labour's most succesful leader...(finish it yourself) - Mark Steel

I became politicised as I got towards my mid teens. Firstly with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament when I was around 14, then with the Labour Party a couple of years later. Foot marked the end of a period, and his replacement heralded in a succession of leaders intent on making Labour more electable by shifting to the right.

I find it hard to imagine that I'll feel any real sorrow when the Browns and Blairs of this world turn up their toes, but along with Tony Benn, Michael Foot represents something we've now lost in British politics.

As someone else remarked, A little bit of integrity goes a long, long way.

The Argus

Ween do a lot of college humour stuff, but I think this is outstanding. The video is just someone on the internet's interpretation. I think the sounds and imagary fit together well.

Reading Road Markings...

You're driving from Left to Right approaching this junction, and have been asked to turn right at the end of the road. It's your driving test and you're nervous. If you're a driver, you can appreciate that this is not a straightforward junction. You're actually dealing with a T junction that joins a one way street, and then immediately dealing with turning right at the end of that one way street. The situation is made slightly more complex by the junction on the left abutting the first bit of the junction.



Ultimately, you're trying to go from the first yellow arrow to the second, and there are several ways of getting this wrong, as well as the usual ways of doing a junction wrongly.

First of all, you're initially going down a two-way road, but ahead of you, you can see a one way street. So it's easy to assume that you're already on a one way street. Moving onto the wrong side of the road before you get to the first part of the junction is the commonest way of failing here. And the examiners do have to fail you for it. You're driving down the wrong side of the road on approach to quite a blind corner. If someone turned left into the street from the one way bit, you could have a head on collision. The clue is the dotted lines at the end of the road. There's a double row on the left hand side of the road, but only a single row on the right hand side.

The second way of bollocking this up is to treat the whole thing as two-way. You get the first bit right, but then you incorrectly keep to the left lane as you turn right at the end. This is less dangerous, but the examiners will still mark it as a serious driving fault. You can tell it's the end of a one way street because the double row of dotted lines extend across the full width of the junction, and there are two give way triangles, one in each lane.

Thirdly and finally, you can attempt to turn right at the end of the first bit instead of the second, heading the wrong way into a one way street. There are some nice red no entry signs to help you avoid doing this, but should you miss them, you've got a good chance of smashing head on into a bus. The examiner would probably mark this as a reason to fail you.

Thought I'd something more to say...

I haven't been able to log in to blogger for the last few days. Viewing my blog(s) has been tortuous. Getting in has been totally impossible. Connection time out every time.

I suppose I could have committed my thoughts to a text document, and then shoved them onto the blog when things sorted themselves out, but I never thought of it. One for the future I suppose.

So what's been on my mind?

I've been thinking about how fiction can contain real wisdom. that follows on from my Books post I suppose.

I saw an article about sky burial that got me thinkiong about how we deal with the shell that's left behind once consciousness has departed.

There's a breakdown of my blog list. What's on it, what will be on it, what used to be on it, and what will not be on it.

I've been thinking about doing a sort of Google Earth based biography of my Dad.

And there's a driving one, explaining how where and why one of my pupils failed his test.

The driving one's coming up next...