More old news

Here we are again, starting a whole new year with the unnerving feeling that if we go outdoors for any length of time we will cause the immediate and irreversible end of all life on earth. Staying in and doing nothing has its charms of course, not least the fact that I can wear the same pair of pyjamas all day long for a whole week. But there’s not much to write about.

Back in May I posted a series of photos taken on that day in previous years, and it was so well received, and I was showered in such huge volumes of adoring fan mail, that I decided to do it again. So, let’s find out: what was Past Chris doing on this day in history?

The Pouring Beans intellectual property portfolio

It occurred to me the other day, when Kev trademarked the name “Metal Horse™”, that we’ve trademarked quite a few terms over the years, and the terms that make up our intellectual property must now be quite substantial.

I have, therefore, conducted several exhausting days* of research to discover just how wide-ranging our various trademarks are, and I can present the results to you now for the first time. So here are all of the Pouring Beans trademarked terms, every last one, in chronological order.

Goodbye Metal Horse

Today is a sad day, its the day we’ve had to say goodbye to the Metal Horse™.

A new thing: photos!

This is something I thought about a while ago, and may also have mentioned, but also may not have. Anyway, whether I mentioned it or not, it has now changed from “a thing I was thinking about” to “a thing I did”.

We’ve all got lots of photos from all the times we’ve met up and done stupid things. All mine are just sitting around on my phone or in folders somewhere on my laptop. That’s useless, when they should really be here on the Beans, in our shrine to three lifetimes misspent doing pointless things that nobody but us find funny.

So I’ve done a bit of faffing and made a photo gallery thing. You can find it by clicking Photos in the menu, or by clicking on these words here.

If you’re like me, and you have photos, then you should also add them, and together we will have lots of photos, which we can look at occasionally, and the rest of the time we will ignore them, just like everything else on this website.

How do I add photos to the things?

Good question.

In the admin interface, go to FooGallery > Galleries, and either create a new one or edit an existing one. If you’re making a new one, give it a name.
Click “add media”. This opens the same interface you use to add photos to blog posts. You can upload pictures or select them from the media library here. Select all the pictures you want to include.
In the sidebar, select how you want them sorted. You can try it by date or by title, depending what works best. You don’t need to change any other settings.
Click publish (if it’s new) or update (if it’s not).

If you made a new gallery, you now need to add it to the album list so it turns up on the photos page. This is easy.

Go to FooGallery > Albums.
Click “edit” on the album “Photos”.
Click the new gallery you created, so it gets a blue tick on it like all the others. You can drag it to another place if the galleries are in the wrong order.
Click update.

You now know as much about this as I do. Hurrah!

Literary Gold

I know what you’re both thinking and, no, it’s not another one of my much-loved, imitated and lauded best-selling novels. Calm down my precious fans, you haven’t missed a pre-order for another first edition that you can keep your families warm with over those long winter months. This is something completely different.

Prior to being hoisted back into clothes and into the general population by work, I was having yet another sort out in order to try and fit a large amount of THINGS into the same space they’ve been living in for six months now. This requires a meticulous amount of opening boxes, sighing loudly and then trying to squish something else into it in the hope that the top will still stay on once I’ve pushed a large rectangle into a tiny triangular slot. Most of the time it works. Soon I may have to invest in some more shelves and possibly some hammocks for the corners.

I unearthed yet another pile of gibberish, which is what I refer to anything I was scribbling in prior to this post. I have a lot of it, notebooks and notebooks of word guff hastily wangled around early attempts by post-modern hedonistic oober artist, Reuben. Sandwiched in-between my original lyrics for ’10 out of 10 out of 10 (out of 10 out of 10)’ and Reuben’s sketches for something called ‘Pirate Chicken and Son’ (spoiler: you don’t need pants to be cool), there was a couple of pages you may recognise:

It’s important for a number of reasons:

It features Chris’s disgusting scrodsack of change (or was it Kev’s?);
There are a number of facts including Marshall can sense mums with his crotch, that mushrooms come last and that I am an eager-maniac;
The original appearance of cult favourite Wexford and his cheese-polishing adventures;
The height chart to explain how tall Kevin is.

I would donate the entire thing to Chris’ archives but there some boring old Christmas lists and some other questionable songs I wrote that take up the majority of the book so it would be a fool’s errand. I may carefully rip the pages out and send them via special courier so that they reach you in one piece now that Steve “Steady on, now” Steveingtons has finally given up on his restraining order and let you back in your flat.

A Tunnock’s tragedy

As you almost certainly know, last year I made the fatal error of joking to Ian that what I wanted for Christmas was a bucket of Tunnock’s Teacakes. For Christmas he got me a bucket of Tunnock’s Teacakes.

Despite eating a lot of Tunnock’s Teacakes – including, on more than one occasion, eating three of them as “breakfast dessert” – there were still some sitting in the bucket at the end of March.

At the end of March, of course, I was forced to abandon my usual residence on top of the exploding mattress emporium, and among the many belongings I left behind, I foolishly failed to cram a bucket of teacakes into my suitcase.

A couple of weeks ago my flatmate Steve “Stevey” Stevingtons was kind enough to fly overhead in a sort of psychedelic biplane and airdrop some of my belongings, including several t-shirts, a few bits of post that I would have been happy never to receive, and a bucket containing precisely five Tunnock’s Teacakes.

I ate one and I won’t be eating any more.

The passage of a further four months has caused them to deflate. Inside, the chocolate is now strange with white bits in it, and the marshmallow has turned sort of hard and chewy. The biscuit is virtually inedible.

The last four teacakes from that epic gift are now, as a result, in the bin. A sad end to a brilliant Christmas gift.

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.

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:

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!”
“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.”
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.”
“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.
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.