Underneath the safari suit he wears as part of his television show Play Along With Sam, Moran bears a tattoo unlike anything  Topics has ever seen.

A multicoloured collection of passport stamps from the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, Mexico, Hong Kong, UAE and Malaysia is slowly colonising the inside of his left arm, with each stamp inked while Moran was visiting the corresponding country either on tour or for holiday.

‘‘I got the first one on May 31, 2010,’’ he said.

‘‘You know how people talk about how they start getting an itch and they want more and more?

‘‘This was my idea to keep me from going crazy ...  but it’s also ended up being part of a bigger piece of art.’’

Moran intends to continue to add to the collection.

Which shouldn’t be hard given he’s such a frequent flyer – including at least 30 times to the US on tour and to visit his American wife’s relatives.

Moran visits The Playhouse in Newcastle on April 24 for his live show Play Along With Sam: Sam’s Animal Adventure.

Any local tattooist keen to claim a space on Sam’s arm? What little symbol could we chuck on a passport when the Hunter inevitably secedes?

EVER had a co-worker with a hidden talent that emerged one day from nowhere?

Like maybe Geoff from HR revealed a degree in aerospace engineering, or Beth in advertising told you about the one time she climbed Everest?

We’re betting a few people over at ABC Newcastle felt that way when Saturday producer Sophie Brown told them she had invented a font. Yes, invented a font.

OK, here’s the story.

While you might not notice consciously, Brown tells us that for graphic designers font is a serious deal.

‘‘A really nice piece of design can be ruined by a bad font,’’ she explained to us, patiently.

In her second year of university she took a typography class and got hooked, then last year she travelled to Rome for a short masters course on typography with  New York School of Visual Arts.

While she was there she started sketching for Strato, a font that she’s since spent – literally – hundreds and hundreds of hours working on. 

As she explains it, the font is inspired by a lot of the ancient stone inscriptions in Rome, a city where the origins of the alphabet were first put down (hence why a New York school is in Italy).

Kind of ... cool, right?

Anyway after all that work, Strato has now been accepted into My Fonts, one of the biggest and most popular foundries in the world, and Brown is rightfully pumped.

‘‘It really was a pretty big adrenaline rush after all the work I had put into it,’’ she said.

You’re kind of interested now, huh? Go to www.sophieelinor.com to check out her stuff.

WHEN the Herald  reported last week that mosquitoes in Newcastle and Port Stephens had been found to be infected with the Ross River virus, it quickly got your attention.

The post has been seen by more than 170,000 people on Facebook, and shared more than 1800 times.

Our web gurus tell us it’s one of our most popular posts ever, and the majority of the traffic is coming from the university, where the mozzies are always in force.

Not that we want to play down the seriousness of the warning, but with symptoms like lethargy, tiredness and a mysterious rash, we think the students may have already been infected.