Month: May 2020

Avatar Smug it up

It is terrible, absolutely terrible when you cannot find the thing you are looking for. I must have looked for, ooo, less than five minutes and they just aren’t there.

Where are all the photos of smug fuckers who live on canals? Hidden away in people’s photo albums no doubt. The internet refused to give up the goods so I had to make my own.

God damn useless internet.

Avatar Old news

It’s hard to know what to say, these days, when you talk to people, because nobody has any news. What do you talk about when nobody has anything to talk about? How do you fill a blog post when you haven’t done anything worth remembering?

Luckily for me, I am now quite old, so what I’ve decided to do is go back and see what past Chris was doing on this day years ago.

Read More: Old news »

Avatar The 5 worst things Morrissey’s arms have ever said

*Clickbait*

We all know that Stephen Patrick Morrissey is an outspoken English faded popstar, to quote a certain Mr Manly. The internet is scattered with the daft, racist and downright bizarre things that he has said after almost 40 years in the music business. Does he say them for fun, to gain publicity to keep his fame up or does he actually mean it?

Something that has been kept under wraps though has been the second layer of bad, the custard skin under Morrissey’s comments, another level of absurdity below the absurdity. Morrissey’s arms are just as bad as the person they’re attached to. Here are, in no particular order, are the top five worst things that they have uttered:

  1. Whilst out on the town in 2004 celebrating the release of his seventh studio album ‘You Are the Quarry’, and after way too many Sunset Margaritas, Morrissey’s arms were overheard bragging that, “Poor people are only good for two things: shooting and lighting my cigars off!”
  2. “I once glued three 9 year old children together to make a 27 year old man and it didn’t work.” This was taken from an interview with Monta Mino, a hugely popular Japanese television presenter in 2004. Morrissey’s arms claim that the comment was mistranslated at the time but later he stood by it and added, “We called him Winston and he lived in my garage for three months. I spat on him every time I saw him.”
  3. His taste in food and drink are more well-known than anything else as Morrissey’s arms edited the food column in the Guardian for the best part of five years between 2008 and 2013. That said, during his tour in 2015 he let slip to a journalist prior to his gig in Birmingham, “I eat pangolins three times a week. I can’t eat them all so I leave them alive until halfway through and then throw away the rest. Raw pangolin tastes like liquid gold.”
  4. “Alfred Bonar Law was a waste of space. I have artists paint his likeness into mangoes and then I shove my thumb in his eyes for fun.” Referring to Law, the shortest serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century, Morrissey’s arms also went on to question his sexuality and his ability to use a bow and arrow in an interview with Time Magazine in 2005.
  5. A lot of the time the views between left and right arms match. Sometimes though their opinions conflict leading to some dramatic confrontations. When asked by Jonathan Ross to elaborate on his opinions of France, Morrissey’s left arm begin with, “I visit it several times a year. They bring so much to Europe that one cannot underestimate the cultural impact of France, even if most of them smell like dead turds floating in a pool of piss.” The right then barged in, “I want to put all of them in a box and shut the lid using a sharp flamethrower. One time me and Bono got so drunk we steamrolled a village in Cumberland and blamed it on the French.”

The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree and those armpits stink for a reason.

Thanks for watching, feel free to like and subscribe and for all things Morrissey’s arms keep it PB Beans 2020.

Avatar Now, more than ever

These are strange times, I know, and presumably the creative people who come up with ideas for adverts are a bit stuck for inspiration. (Not that they were brilliant at it before.) That might be why they’ve all come up with the same four words to use in their adverts.

Now, more than ever, companies are telling us that now, more than ever, is the time to buy their stuff, whatever it is. Once you notice it you can’t ignore it any more. It’s everywhere.

Here are just some of the now-more-than-everers:

  • Tesco, who tell us that now, more than ever, every little helps.
  • Nespresso, because now, more than ever, their coffee machine pods are technically recyclable (but not in your council recycling).
  • Barclays, where now, more than ever, their “digital eagles” will show you how to use the Internet.
  • Every single charity with a fundraising campaign right now.
  • Country Walking Magazine, who are running very strange adverts to tell us that now, more than ever, is the time to buy a magazine about something that has literally been illegal for the last two months.

There is no solution to this ongoing crisis. The only coping mechanism I’ve found so far is to repeat the words “now, more than ever” back at the TV whenever one of these adverts comes on.

That doesn’t help, obviously. It’s just something to do. But maybe that’s enough – because now, more than ever, we need a way to cope with this unimaginative catchphrase.

Avatar Letter to the RSPB

Way back, many moons ago, there was a suggestion from myself that Chis and I had written to the RSPB to complain about the lack of dinosaurs. The conversation can be found in the comments below the post An Admission of Sorts, a summary is included here:

“It is a letter that needs to be sent. I imagine that much like the one me and Chris wrote to the RSPB about the lack of dinosaurs at Fairburn Inngs, it will be ignored, but it must be sent nonetheless….”

Kev

“Two things are needed here… The second is more information about the letter to Fairburn Ings, which I have no memory of.”

Chris

“Is the letter mentioned on here, Kev?”

Ian

“I’ll have a chumble[sic], it feels like it should be.”

Kev

It wasnt. There was no mention of it which led to comments such as…

“Maybe the right thing to do now is ask whether it happened at all, or whether it’s some sort of weird dream.”

Chris

Well today, I have BIG NEWS. I found it. Just the letter mind, sadly the enclosed drawing must have been a one off and is lost to the mists of time. It’s a doozy let me tell you.

Sadly Mr. Steven James never received a reply to the RSPB, it’s almost as if they didn’t take us seriously.

Clicken for Big.
RSPB.docDownload

In a side note, the little bit in the comments below the throw away bit about a letter that might not exist, is an excellent little ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ riff from Chris and Ian. Well done chaps, it made me lols all over again.

Avatar 14 today

It’s 14 years ago today that the very first post was made on the Old Beans. That’s 14 solid years of stupid blog posts, half-baked comic strips and comment threads laden with impenetrable in-jokes. Hooray for us!

I will admit to being both surprised and vaguely horrified that we have clocked up a full decade and a half on this silly website. It seems a bit over the top to regard this as an achievement, especially since we have achieved literally nothing: 14 years in, we still have no audience beyond ourselves.

But I will allow a moment of pride and back-patting for the minor achievement that, 14 years in, we are posting far better and more interesting stuff than we did at the beginning. This is not a project that ran out of steam, it’s one that has developed and grown. Well done us.

I was hoping, at this point, to see how close we are to overtaking the Old Beans with the New Beans, because in my head the Old Beans ran for millions of years and the New Beans is some cheeky young upstart that’s barely old enough to be in long trousers. But that’s not true.

The Old Beans ran from 17 May 2006 to 23 January 2012, a total of 2,078 days.

We will ignore the comic strip era and step ahead to the New Beans, which began on 6 January 2014. As of today, it has been running for 2,324 days.

The New Beans actually overtook the (Duration? Longitude? Lengthiness? Vastness?) length of time the Old Beans had been running back on 15 September last year, a day on which we celebrated this milestone by making no new posts at all.

Anyway, the point is: the Beans has now been running for 14 years, making it one of the longest-running and greatest achievements of my, or anyone else’s, life. And for that we should be thankful. Let’s all raise a glass, or at least an eyebrow, on this momentous occasion.

Avatar Nostalgia – Young Me (and him)

Look at you. How old are you? You’re very old. You have done lots of things in your life and more often than not someone will have been there to make a note of it or possibly take a photo.

Nostalgia is what sells lots of old crap in that you remember how it was “back in the day” and then you want to get that feeling back by, I don’t know, buying your first car again, playing that Atari you had up in your uncle’s loft or investing in Microsoft shares. When I was looking for a photo for my brother I found a few photo albums, most of which were filled with sentimental (i.e. pointless) photos of my bedroom when I was 9 and other guff. I did, however, stumble upon several re-discovered gems of what used to happen when Kev and I, and sometimes Tom, would get whammed.

Now don’t get your hopes up, dear people. If you’re looking for sordid, filthy accounts of unscrupulous behaviour then you’re really on the wrong website (you took a wrong turn at boobpedia.com). What I’m talking are polaroids (easy now) of us all looking young surrounded by drinks bottles and cans. If you ever wanted to know what Kevin looked like with a bog roll on his head, holding one of those plastic separators you get with cans of lager, then you’ve come to the right place. If you were “desperate” to see a photo of me fake passed out on the floor then go no further.

I don’t remember ever looking that young but I know it happened. Here’s the proof: