#892 Curly hair - Let me bore you to sleep (Jason Newland) (22nd September 2022)

Hello, hello and welcome. Hello again and welcome again to... Oh, what could it be? Who could it be? Where could it be? Yes, that's right, it's here. It's Bill.

Hello and welcome to Let Me Bore You To Sleep. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. Yes.

And also my name's Jason Newland and my website's jasonnewland.com. So hey, how you doing? Are you well? Are you well? So what I thought I'd do is... I'm gonna read a book. I'm gonna read a book. This is National Geographic Kids Weird But True 2022.

Wild and Wacky Facts and Photos. Now you're not going to get the benefit of the photos because it's, well, you can't see them. But I am.

I'll tell you what I'm not going to get the benefit of though is no light. I need the light on now. I'm gonna go over and turn it on.

Ready to sit down? Are you ready everyone? It's almost like I have to make those side effects. But you know, it's just I have to do it because I'm old. I hope this isn't too crinkly.

Anyway, this is what I'm doing anyway. So I thought I would, I hope you're well. I hope the sound quality's okay and all that.

I hope everything's groovy. What should I focus on? I suppose I could focus on not speaking with such a high pitched voice. What can I look at first? So you've got amazing earth, incredible creatures, step back in time.

I'll have a drink of Coke. That was loud. Get a move on.

Mind-boggling buildings out of this world. Well, it's quite a few. Sporting superstars.

Grubs up. Cooly creative. The human body.

Everything on the environment. Which is it everything on the environment? That's chapter 13. 12 pages long.

It's not gonna be everything, is it? Gruesomely gross by the numbers. I'll just do a little scan. I'll do a little, little book scan.

Because I've got all these books and I just don't look at them. So I thought, you know what? You know what? You know what? I'm gonna start looking at them. The word volcano comes from Roman.

The Roman name Vulcan. Vulcan was the Roman god of fire. Now, I beg to differ.

I think you'll find that the Vulcan is Spock. Mr. Spock. And nothing else you say will make any difference to that fact that is stuck in my head.

10 lightning quick facts about lightning. Why are they talking about the weather? My favorite subject. Amazing Earth.

Okay. Lightning strikes. Okay.

Earth's okay. Lightning strikes Earth's at around 3 million. What? No.

No. Lightning strikes Earth's surface at around 3 million times a day. That's nearly 44 times every second.

Well, it clearly must generally be places where there's no humans. Otherwise, we'd hear about it, wouldn't we? We'd hear about it. I mean, it's not like it'd be kept quiet.

We would hear. In fact, if for those that go outside, perhaps would notice. A bolt of lightning is about five times hotter than the surface of the sun, but it's only about as thick as your thumb.

Five times hotter than the surface of the sun. A lot of my question is this. I've got a lot of questions, but how do they know? How? How? I mean, yeah, just how? First of all, how do they know how hot the sun's surface is? Because we've never been there.

We can't go there. Because we would just dissolve. So we can't.

No one's ever been to the surface of the sun to actually gain the temperature. So it's guesswork. I think it'd be funny if they finally did get close to the sun and they realize it's cold.

Yeah. I mean, that happened with Mars. They thought it was going to be, didn't they say it was a cold planet, but actually it's a warm planet.

Or they thought it was a warm planet, but it's actually a cold planet. One of them. No, Mars was always supposed to be really warm, wasn't it? Like the red planet.

It turns out that actually it's ice. Something like that. The thickness of your thumb.

I mean, it's still pretty thick, isn't it? I don't know about that. Five times hotter than the surface of the sun. No one would survive, would they? If that was true.

I mean, those who did survive, they'd just be walking around with a hole in them the size of a thumb. I mean, right, here's a word I can't say. Fulgurite.

Well, I just did say it, but whether it's correct or not, it's a form of glass that is made when lightning strikes sand. Now, is that how whoever discovered glass discovered glass? Because they saw this hot thing hit the sand, which caused a layer of what looked like something that would be handy to be in the window frame. Because that must have been annoying.

Imagine before windows. I mean, the wind would just blow everything in, wouldn't it? Because there was these window frames with nothing in them. I wonder how many thousands of years those window frames were just gaps, nothing in the gaps.

And if you live somewhere, because it makes sense that we know that glass comes from heating sand. And there's no way, I mean, the most sand, you know, apart from beaches, is desserts, isn't it? Desserts. So, and that, that must be annoying to live in a dessert, especially when it's windy, blowing all that sand into your house.

You need a window, wouldn't you? But then the ironic thing is when sand, like a sandstorm, blows against glass, it makes the glass all dirty. It kind of almost does the opposite to with sand. I mean, you'd think that if anything could cling glass, it would be sand.

Considering glass comes from sand. Or am I looking too deeply into it? Maybe. Right.

In the right or rather the wrong conditions, helicopters can actually cause lightning strikes. Why are you telling me this? Why am I telling you this? Keep it light, JJ. Blimey, I can't believe I'm starting a, you know, doing this recording.

It's a nice, relaxing, sleepy recording. And I'm talking about lightning strikes. I apologize.

I want to move on. Lightning has been observed on two other planets in the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn. That's interesting.

I mean, I like other planets, perhaps a bit too much, perhaps more than this one. Because it's all, I can see possibilities, you know, it's like, okay, what can we learn? What, not me, because I've done nothing wrong. What can those that have done stuff wrong learn? And you might say, oh, you say you've done nothing wrong, but what about the environmental disaster? You're, you're part of that problem.

Well, not really. Other than being born, I'm not responsible for what the powers that be have done to the environment. I didn't create cars.

I didn't discover petrol. I didn't put petrol into cars. I didn't, I've never chucked anything into the sea ever once apart from when the times that I do, you know, sometimes I do collect a big bag of rubbish and chuck it in there.

But I have special occasions. Generally, I don't. And I, I've been pretty good.

I don't drive. I've never driven. I've never even had a motorbike.

Well, I have had a motorbike. Okay, when I said I've had a motorbike, nothing weird, I owned a couple of mopeds and a motorbike. But I never actually learned to drive or ride them.

The motorbike, yeah, the motorbike got stolen by someone who said he'd be able to fix it for me. To be honest, I was happy to let it go because it was in the way. Didn't let him know that.

And the good thing about it is because it was, well, generally this happens. The good thing about being, having your stuff stolen from a local person is they keep out of the way, which is a good thing. You know, at least you don't have to see them.

Now, the weird thing about it, I had that happen here. Someone in a borrowing money and getting, you know, promising to pay it back. And this is years ago and he still kept coming back.

He still kept coming back. And I, well, you're supposed to be hiding now. What's going on? It's basically stolen.

You're supposed to be hiding. But he doesn't have a conscious, conscious conscience. It's weird.

Strange people I've met in my life. I don't know if there's anyone I've met that I wish I'd met. I think they think, oh, I'm so glad I met them.

It sounds bad, doesn't it? I'm only kind of joking. As well as traveling down to earth from clouds, lightning also travels up from the ground to the sky. Don't be so silly.

Doesn't travel into the sky. It comes from the sky. Doesn't travel into the sky.

Why do they make this stuff up? The air around lightning expands rapidly due to the extremely high temperature, creating an explosive shockwave that we hear as thunder. Oh, I didn't know that lightning and thunder were connected. Oh, I had a little interruption there.

Somebody was at the door. There's someone at the door. Right.

Should we stop talking about lightning? Shall we? Yeah. See the wood for the trees. I've got the wrong glass.

No, I've got the right glasses on, which explains why I can see the writing. What dynamite trees? A dynamite tree. The sandbox tree is one of the most dangerous trees in the world.

It is covered in thorns, is poisonous and has exploding fruit. The sap of the sandbox tree can cause blindness. The fruit of the sandbox tree is poisonous and causes vomiting and diarrhea.

The fruits also explode, sending seeds flying through the air over 240 kilometers per hour. Why am I reading this out? This is supposed to be a fun book for children. National Geographic kids.

Weird but true. Wild and wacky facts and photos. So far, lightning and poisonous blowing up trees.

Explosive trees. Why? Why? Why? Come here a bit more cuddlier. Okay.

Oh, here's one. Wow. A tree.

A banyan tree in Pakistan has been under arrest and held in chains for over 120 years. You heard me right. Under arrest for 120 years.

The tree was held for under arrest in 1898 when a British Army officer thought he saw the tree moving towards him in a suspicious way. Another banyan tree in India, pictured here. Oh, so they're not showing a picture of the actual tree that's under arrest for some reason, is the wildest, the widest tree in the world.

Its canopy covers more areas than two rugby pitchers. Why did they not show the picture of the tree that's under arrest? That would have made more sense, I think. Totally weird.

Over 2000 years ago, during a battle, a forest was used to crush an advancing Roman army, Littorali. Trees in the forest in northern Italy were cut so that just a simple push would cause them to topple like dominoes. When the army marched through the forest, the trees were pushed onto them, leaving only tens of... Oh, okay.

That's another gnoss. That's not such a nice story, is it? Okay, what about this then? The wood wide web. Before trees evolved, the surface of earth was covered in huge mushrooms.

They could reach eight meters tall, which is about the same height as a house. Mushrooms are vital for trees and forests to grow. Beneath every forest, there is a vast hidden network of pale, thread-like structures called mycelia.

These are all parts of the mushroom or fungus that you don't see. They help to provide trees with the nutrients they need and transport nutrients over long distances. Ah, so mushrooms are very important.

Didn't know that. I don't mind mushrooms. I'm not fanatical about mushrooms.

I can't see any time in my life where I will sit down and write a poem about mushrooms. Not that into them. But occasionally I've eaten mushrooms and they're quite nice.

My only issue is, you know, as I've grown up and I got into catering and there was always that warning of mushrooms, you know, be careful. And I don't want to be that careful about things I put in my mouth. Which, having said it quite quickly, makes me think that maybe I should rephrase that.

Um, okay, this, so I'm not going to read this. This is about volcanoes now. We don't need to read about volcanoes.

There's weird weather. Oh, there's weird, there's weird in them, their hills. Okay, Mount Thor in Canada, named after the Norse god of thunder, features cliff, the cliff face with the highest vertical drop in the world.

Wow. Wow. That is quite, it's one, the cliff is over one kilometre high, 1250 metres to be exact.

It's actually steeper than vertical as it has a 105% overhang. I don't know what one kilometre high is, call it kilometre. Um, it looks quite high to me.

And I'm not going. You can't make me. It says here that some hills in the world seem to defy the laws of gravity.

At places such as the appropriately named Confusion Hill in California, Magnetic Hill in Canada, or the Electric Bray or Bray in Scotland, cars appear to roll uphill. Huh. There's actually a sign on Magnetic Hill and it says, the phenomenon that defines gravity.

Park your vehicle in the box marked with paint on the road and experience the wonder. It's spelled experience wrong, but I don't care. I don't care because I'm happy that it's an opportunity to experience the wonder of whatever the wonder is.

Oh, a land of chocolate. So in the Philippines, there's an area, a bunch of cone shaped hills known as the Chocolate Hills. And so they get their name because, because their plants look like chocolate.

And it's a chocolatey brown colour in the dry season. And they say legends as it that they were made by giants. But scientists think they'll be made by coral being eroded by rainwater over thousands of years.

Scientists just have to just break the dreams, don't they? What's wrong with them being made by giants? Isn't that more interesting? Be honest. Isn't that more interesting than well, actually, it's probably just the water and the corals and, you know, thousands and thousands of years of erodation by the rainwater. And it's created the shape that it is.

No giants, giants every day. Give me giants. Right.

Apparently. All right. If you stand on the top of Mount Everest, like most of us have, of course, and you'd think that you are on top of the world, and you would be higher than nearly everyone.

But not people who have climbed to the summit of Mount Chimborazo. So the Mount Chimborazo, which is a volcanic mountain in Ecuador. And also, if you climb to the top of that, you're actually closer to the moon than from Everest, because I always should all know this anyway, really, by looking at the moon is not a perfect round shape.

It's got it's I've always said it's lumpy. It's not round, it's lumpy. And the earth does bulge out in the middle.

So whoever whatever, on top of that bulge will be further into space. That makes sense, I think. Right, what we've got here, a hoodoo.

These are fairy chimneys. A hoodoo is a natural rock. It looks like someone's balanced a large boulder on top of a spire of rock.

It actually looks more like the word I nearly said. Cappadocia in Turkey is home to some of these formations, also known as fairy chimneys. They were created from volcanic deposits that were sculpted by wind and water erosion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Giants, giant fairies made them. Home in the ground in Matmatar, southern Tunisia, some homes are literally holes in the ground.

These are called troglodyte houses. Okay, troglodyte, where have I heard that word before? I think I got called a troglodyte once. I don't know what it means.

A hotel in Matmatar, featured in the Star Wars movies as part of the planet Tatooine. Tatooine? Tatooine? Oh, hairy volcanoes. I've got to look at this.

I can't can't move on from the word hairy volcanoes. It was hard to move away from the hairy anything, but hairy volcanoes. Wow, I'm very excited about this.

So an eruption of a hotel volcano in Hawaii. It's the volcano is called Kelauea. It created golden strands of what looked like hair, but the strands were actually not hair, but they were glass made by the lava and were thin and dangerously sharp.

The volcanic glass, they call it Pele's hair, after the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. They have a Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. Wow, I didn't know there was such things like that.

How about this? Baikal Zen. Baikal Zen is a strange phenomenon. So it happens when a rock freezes to an icy surface.

And over time, wind erodes or the sun melts the ice below, leaving the rock perched on a pedestal. So it's almost like a piece of art. Wow.

Ring of fire. I'm not going to read. I don't want to talk about rings of fire at the moment.

So look at a different book. How about believe it or not, 2022 edition. Oh, come on.

Stop messing about. That's it. Right.

All true or weird or wild or new. Blimey, you hear that? I've not opened it before. So, unboxing what's inside.

57 strange creations. 45 hair raising feats. 120 astounding animals.

223 bizarre technology. 149 natural wonders. 228 amazing cultures.

I don't want to know about cultures, cultures, all these cultures, culture this, culture that. 223 bizarre technologies. Oh, that's the page.

Is that the page? 223. It might be, you know? No, it won't be because it's nearly the end of the book. 223.

Ribbit exhibit. Oh, dear. Oh, no, it is.

223 is bizarre technology. So let's have a look. Slothbot, a slow-moving solar-powered robot, travels along a cable between trees to collect data affecting endangered species.

Oh, wow. Here's a few little stories. When Zookeeper, Zookeeper left her mobile phone in a room at Yangchen Wild Animal World in Jiangsu Province, China, a baboon grabbed it and started making online purchases.

So the Zookeeper was surprised to find messages confirming orders to her shopping cart, and when she checked the surveillance footage, she saw the baboon picking up her phone with its hands and swipe left and right on the screen. How did she expect it to pick it up? I can't believe it did it. It didn't do it with his tongue.

It did it with his fingers. Don't understand. What's this? Fire escape.

Danielle Schaefer was asleep in bed when a fire raged through her Lansing, New York apartment block until her rescue cat Kitty jumped on her. Thanks to the pet's vigilance, Schaefer got out safely, and although Kitty was unable to go to her bedroom at the time, she survived. She survived.

And wow. So she survived by hiding in the pillows and she survived the whole night. I want to read stuff that isn't weird.

I don't mind weird, but I don't want anything that's just... Granny care. Young orcas are much more likely to survive if they have a living grandmother in the group to look after them and help them find salmon feeding grounds. Just shows you the importance of grandparents.

Because I do focus on my grandmother. And some might think, well, you never mentioned your grandfather. And the reason for that is not... Well, first of all, well, actually, I didn't have... So my step mom, my first step mom, I was close to her mom.

So she was my grandmother. But I didn't have another... So I had my dad's mom and my step mom's mom. So I was very close to both of them.

And so my step mom, my step mom's mom, who was my gran, my nan, she, her husband, she lost him many, many years ago. Sort of like probably when I was born or, you know, a few years after I was born, middle 70s or early 70s. So, you know, I'd never met, never met him.

I would have liked to done because he seemed like a nice man. And, and then my granddad, my, like, so I have a, on my mom's side, my original mom, I have a grandmother and a granddad. My granddad would already left.

He'd already left the planet before I was born. So I never got to see him. And I don't remember meeting my grandmother.

Of course I did when I was a baby for the first probably six months of my life. I would seen him, seen her rather, but I don't remember, which is a shame. But so I never had a granddad apart from my dad's dad.

And he was so quiet. He never spoke. He didn't speak to me.

And because I'm a chatterbox, probably to people I like, but people that I'm, you know, or if I'm on my own, I'm a chatterbox. He wasn't a chatterbox. He really was quiet.

So it's kind of, that's why I don't really mention him. Not, not out of any weird disrespect or anything weird. I just don't, I didn't get to know him.

I really didn't get to know him. And even though he was alive till I was 20, 20 years old. So I'd known him since the age of seven, really.

I kind of seen him regularly for 13 years. And I, I can only remember having perhaps three conversations with him. And I don't know, just, he was a very, very quiet person.

And I know why, I kind of know why he was. And near the end of his, of his time, he did apparently start talking to his children, my uncles and aunts and my dad and that, about what he'd been through in the early forties. And, you know, he'd never talked about that stuff before.

So he, you know, I guess he, maybe that's why he kept quiet so that he was keeping everything inside. But he was a good man. And I just never didn't really talk to me.

I'd visit. So when I visited him, I visited my nan. That was who I was visiting.

Apart from like Christmas and, you know, my granddad would be there and he'd be sitting in his chair and, you know, we'd all be there together. But outside of family events, when I knocked on the front door or knocked on the side gate and went in, I was visiting my nan. Whether my granddad was there or not, it was my nan I was going to see.

That was just very evident because she's the only one that really sort of talked to me. But I do remember a couple of conversations I had with my granddad. And one was about his politics.

He was very into his politics. And he was interested in, you know, politics, the government and what was going on. And so he'd, you know, I had a conversation with him once about that.

I also had a conversation with him about an upcoming Frank Bruno fight. Now, Frank Bruno was, he did end up being the heavyweight champion of the world, boxing. But at this time he hadn't, my granddad never got to see that.

But he was a contender at this time. Probably like, well, yeah, it would have been late 80s, maybe 87, 88 or something. And I was talking to my granddad about it.

It might even have been around the time when Bruno fought Mike Tyson for the world title. And that would have been what, 89? Yeah, 89. So my granddad, we both like had a conversation about it.

And I knew, well, I thought that it would be something that he might talk to me about because he used to be a boxer. So when he was in the army, he was a boxer and he won loads of medals and contests and all kinds of stuff because he served, I think, 12 years in the army before the Second World War. So he retired and then he went back in again.

And so he was, you know, that was something that he was very good at, boxing. So it was something also that he was interested in. So I remember having that conversation with my granddad about boxing and about Frank Bruno.

And yeah, I just remember that. I vaguely remember it. But I remember the feeling of how nice it felt for him to be, just to be talking to me.

Almost, not like an equal because it's never equal. Not really. I think grandparents, it's not an equal relationship.

It's a different, it's like no one really wants it to be equal. I don't think, you know, when you hear some people say, my mum is my best friend, my dad's my best friend. I don't think people really have that with grandparents.

There's, I think there's a degree of, I don't know if it's respect or looking up to or whatever, where it's just not an equal relationship. It's not in a bad way, in a nice way, I think. It's almost, there's something, I think there's something quite nice about being able to be a child, even if it is just for a meal or for a short time to go back and be a little kid again.

And I got that when I was with my nan. I got to feel that way. I mean, I sometimes feel that way with my dad when he tells me off.

But that doesn't feel nice. But I used to like it with my nan, because she never, she would never said anything bad to me. It was always, she'd tell me off for, for maybe, what did she didn't like? She didn't like me cutting my hair.

She liked me to let my hair grow. Not long, but just, she said, you've got such nice, big, thick, curly hair. Why do you cut it off? I said, because it's big, thick and curly then.

That's why. I look like a microphone walking around. He said, but it's, but you've been blessed with that big, thick, curly microphone hair.

And there's a lot of people out there that don't have any hair and they'd love to have that big, thick, curly, not being able to even get a brush through microphone, fuzzy hair that you've got. I said, yeah, but I don't, they're welcome to it then. I don't want, I don't like it.

I want straight hair. I want to be able to have, I want, she said, what is it you want? I said, okay, well, if you want to know, I want to look like Elvis Presley. And she laughed at me.

She said, well, you're never going to look like Elvis Presley. You can stick a wig on your head. You're still not going to look like him.

I said, but I want to. She said, probably you and everyone else. She said, I want to look like Marilyn Monroe.

But it's not going to happen. I said, yeah, but if I put the hair on, she said, if I put the mole, please put a mole on my face. Do you think everyone's going to start thinking that I'm Marilyn Monroe? No, just like putting a wig on your head isn't going to make you look like Elvis Presley.

It's more than his hair. I was like, Nan, why are you saying these things? I just want to be like Elvis. She said, sometimes a bit of reality is possibly useful, especially for you, young Jason.

I used to think that if only my hair was straight, because if you saw my hair now, you'd think, well, it is straight, but that's because it's very, very short. Once it gets a certain length, it starts to go curly. First of all, at the sides and at the back and at the front, like just the edges, you know, just the edges start to go frizzy.

Now, give it time and it starts to go frizzy, like bigger. And I've grown my hair right to the, long enough to reach the back, the middle of my back, nearly my lower back. This was in the early nineties, took me about three years to get there.

Like I started growing it in 1990 and eventually I cut it all off in the summer 1994. No, I started growing it in 91, probably about April time. And then I cut it off in 94, the summer.

And it was so frizzy. I'll give you an example. Actually, as it was growing, I looked very similar to a young Bob Dylan.

So if you are listening to this just for just, just for a little bit of company or entertainment, and you've got your entertainment, but if you've got your phone or you've got some kind of internet, just check out a picture of a young Bob Dylan and you can see what I mean by my hair. His hair was very frizzy and so was mine. Now, once it got long enough for me to tie it back into a ponytail, then you couldn't really see how frizzy it was apart from the split ends, I guess.

But I remember the day that I cut my hair in 2004, I woke up and I honestly, I could not put the brush through my hair. It would not go through. It was so thick and curly.

And it was just sticking up. And it was, it was a bit like, yeah, it was like a really electrical accident. That was a weird noise, an electrical accident gone wrong.

Not that an electric accident would go right. But very staticky, like 1000 people had just been rubbing their balls over the top of my head to make it balls as in tennis balls or something. And while I was asleep, this is going in a different direction to what I was hoping.

You know, I mean, like to make the static so my hair was just, I think it probably was long enough to nearly reach the ceiling. I couldn't get the brush. I was just thinking back to what I just said.

I couldn't get the brush through my hair. And I had a little tantrum. Now, the this was a Saturday morning, probably about 10, 9, 10.

My hairdresser, or my barber, my hairdresser, whatever, that I'd used and continue to use for my entire time in London, from 1989, all the way to 2001. I used this man. He's an Italian hairdresser.

As he got older, he did get someone else in. It was a lady and she, she kind of took over because he was getting on. But for years and years and years, during the 90s, early 90s, he, so I used to go in there and just have the ends cut off and have it, you know, trimmed.

And he'd always like, it's so excited. Oh, oh, come on, can I let me cut it, please? Can I cut it? Can I cut it all off? I said, No. He said, let me cut it all off.

I want to cut it all off. And he gets so excited. I said no.

And, but that, that day I went in and said, do it. He said, don't tease me. Don't tease me.

If it's not true, don't tease me. I said, no, do it. He said, you're sure? I said, yeah.

And he said, you're honestly, you sure? He didn't know if I was being honest, if I was just joking around a lot. And, but I said, no. And even as he was about to cut the ponytail off, he said, you 100%, you're 100%! I said, I'm not sure what you said then, but yeah, just, just go for it.

And he did. And my hair was cutted off. And for the first time in years, I had normal hair, because it was, you know, it was all cut and styled nicely.

It was short, too short to be curly, but not short enough to be like a crew cut, to look like an action man. I already had the action man figure. I don't mean the action man figure.

I mean, my figure was like an action man. You mean no groin? Yeah, very clever. So I just, just a bump, nothing else.

Okay, nice and smooth. All right, okay, just leave it. So my hair was quite cool.

It was sticking up a little bit. And it was, I said, just tidy for the first time. And I could get my hair, my hands through it, my fingers could go through my hair, and a little bit of gel probably.

And I was like, why, why did I spend so many years cultivating that long hair? What was my intention? And I'll be honest, I didn't have an intention. Unless I wanted to look like George Carlin, because George Carlin used to have long hair. And he was one of my favourite comedians.

Maybe that's what it was. Or, or, and this might be even more likely, there was a comedian who's one of my best friends on the comedy circuit called Nick Wilty. We all knew him as Wilty, I didn't know he had a first name.

And he had long hair. And I think secretly, I wanted to be like him. Because he was successful.

He started about the same time as me, early in 91. I say that it already won a contest, a competition in Canada, I think it was, to be a comedian. And if I remember this rightly, I might have it wrong.

But I think he was in Canada, right? And he won this, like a regional, it might be national stand up comedy contest. And then he got kicked out of the country because his visa had run out. It's like, wow, you know? So he, because he was under the radar a bit, I think, until he won the contest.

So he, you know, he was already really good. And he was one of the top comedians, pretty much from the start. He was just a really, really, really good comedian.

And he was doing it as a career, right from the start, like, right, you know, he never, he just didn't ever have, he never had bad gigs. They were always good. And he always had something to talk about, because he was a traveller.

He, he travelled around the world, he'd been in the army, and he travelled to pretty much every country. So he had lots to talk about. And I had nothing to talk about.

I still don't have anything to talk about. It doesn't stop me. But I think subliminally, not just subliminally, but I think subliminally, I might have thought that if I grew my hair long, like Nick Realty, perhaps I would be good at comedy like he was.

And that didn't work. It really didn't. And because it had nothing to do with his hair, or his image.

He was just a brilliant stand up comedian. And he was brilliant. It was so natural.

It was almost effortless. But it wasn't effortless because he put a lot of work into it. And, you know, it's weird, as I look back upon my life, that's one of the things that I kind of maybe wish, I do think about going back to, and maybe going back to doing some stand up.

And whether or not I'd be able to, I don't know. I mean, I could do it, I could definitely get some gigs and not paid ones, but I could perform on stage somewhere. But I don't know what would I talk about.

And it's weird. So I haven't performed on stage since 1998, which is 24 years. 24 years, which is quite a long time.

24, that's a career. That's someone's career. There are people that started around that time, that have been on TV for over 20 years.

They are actually comedy legends in this country. And they started after, or just as I was finishing. It's, it's very strange.

Oh, dear. I don't know. We'll see.

So where have I gone? Where have I moved on from this? Did you know that crows in Japanese cities have been seen dropping a walnut, a walnut on a pedestrian crossing, waiting for a car to crack open the nut by driving over it, and then swooping to eat the crack nut in safety as soon as the pedestrian light turns green. That's clever, isn't it? I think. Yeah, I think that birds, crows are very clever.

Very clever little piglets. Well, let's talk about hair. There's a man here with the longest hair in the world.

Longest hair in the whole wide world. Where is it? Cockroach, urinary, toilet, recorded delivery. It is estimated that the average person would text about 2 million words or more in a lifetime.

Not me. I'm not the average person. I reckon I couldn't have done more than 1000 words so far.

Don't like texting. Don't see the point. For me, texting is like, hello, you alright? Yeah, thanks.

Goodbye. Or if you're meeting someone, I'm running late. Okay, bye.

If it's an emergency, you phone them, innit? You know, innit, eh? Oh dear. So that's it, I think, from moi. So this bloke has 16 foot hair.

That's five meters. Why? I mean, how would you sleep with that much hair? It's in the way, isn't it? Slightly in the way. And imagine if you ever had to run away from someone.

They can literally just stand and wait for five minutes and then just pick up your hair. You can't get away. Unless you've got a pair of scissors with you the whole time.

Ah, so I'm going to go. Thank you for listening. Remember to be kind to yourself.

Remember to be gentle with yourself. You deserve to be happy. And I shall speak to you tomorrow.

Lots of love. Bye.