They're Only Bees
November 20th, 2009

Marty McGovern: This Is (quite a small part of) Your Life

Kicking it off, is a little song by Ian Nesbit. Well, sort of. It’s actually ‘The Seahorses – Love Is The Law’, which Ian has rewritten to make it more Martyriffic.

Marty’s the Law

We met in a big fake sandcastle
It was August 05
He was a scarf  wearing poet
and though he didn’t know it
we’d become friends for life.
Out on the piss with our good friend Chris
that was the life!

Marty and me had adventures
on some crazy drunken nights
there were bad Yank impressions to ward-off
livin’ depressions and kegs kicked about in spite.
We’d had too much to drink so we didn’t think
and we got told off!

Where would we be without Marty’s friendship?
He excites and he opens our mind.
Tales of his shite and his spastical dancing
Marty McGovern you’re one of a kind.

Kunte Kinte chased us with a sprinte
We feared for our behinds
We saw plop on Marty in the shop
It nearly made us blind
his sphincter went slack so he shat in the Jac’
Let’s take him  home

Where would we be without Marty’s friendship?
He excites and he opens our mind.
Tales of his shite and his spastical dancing
Marty McGovern you’re one of a kind

We’ve run through the streets of town in the pouring rain
screaming out for all to hear
we’ve seen tramps eat beans straight from the can
these memories I hold so dear

Where would we be without Marty’s friendship?
He excites and he opens our mind.
Tales of his shite and his spastical dancing
Marty McGovern you’re one of a kind

————————————————————————————————————————-

Here is the video of the actual song, if you’d like to sing the above lyrics loudly over it. Your choice.

…and now, a few words from me. Featuring some of my favourite stories about Marty. His/Our good friend Mel was going to write something too, but she’s too fucking lazy.

Marty:

The Enigma

Marty appeared in an office, some years back, and proceeded to affect the lives of many with his jovial presence. That office, of course, belonged to Royal and Sun Alliance, and the many lives he affected was actually more like 3 lives. But from those three lives, hundreds of little (metaphorical) branches grew, as Marty’s influence spread and affected more and more people. Also he once received a blowjob at a cash machine.

It’s the man’s birthday, he’s 28 years old, leaving him closer to death than many of his crowd. So we’ve decided a short re-cap of our lives with Marty would be good. Although it will ruin most of my favourite stories about the man by putting them out in the public eye, I’m happy to spill them and boost his fucking huge ego even further. It’s sort of like a ‘This Is Your Life’ round-up, but full of comedically shameful stories and for the benefit of other people.

My first memory of the awkward, thin man in the tight pants is obviously from the place where we first worked together. Like most of the other people there, I don’t think he spoke to me much- but then the drinking started, with co-collaborator Ian Nesbit and that one who now lives ‘darn sarf’, Mel Keen (as well as a few others who aren’t really important). Things spiralled out of control quickly, and (despite him leaving the country for a few months) things have gone from strength to strength and he now lives with me. In a totally non-gay way.

The Legend

Marty is famous for three things: Dancing, Poop and the aforementioned Cash Machine shenanigans, but I won’t judge him based on these things alone. Instead, I’ll just talk about them in great detail so every one knows all about them. Ha Ha Ha, Marty. Take that.

His cursed history with human waste has two main peaks. The first took place in the Jacaranda pub in town, where (he claims) a mis-judged trouser-drop in the toilets resulted in his pants being covered in the stuff. It was (he claims), an errant turd that was already in place on the floor, and not actually his own that ended up smeared all over him. He claims (he claims) that his own business was taken care of a very efficient, clean manner and the renegade jeans-ruiner wasn’t actually noticed until he’d left the toilet and indeed was on the way out of the pub. It was Ian who first pointed it out, with a loud ‘IS THAT POO?!” in the middle of a city centre street. Luckily, we were near a tesco, so Marty was able to hurry in and buy some tissues with which to eradicate the mess and clean himself off. Of course, this wasn’t the definitive solution, so he ended up borrowing a pair of my (quite short) jeans for the rest of the night.

BUT! To believe this story is to accept quite a few leaps of the imagination. The toilets in the Jacaranda, as they were at the time, were very cramped. It would take more effort to desicrate the floor than it would to simply use the toilet as intended. The floor-plop would have had to have been put there on purpose, by someone else, in order for Marty to cover himself with it. Do you believe that? Really? Or do you believe that, actually, he did it himself and wiped it on his pants as a misplaced attack on authority? Maybe he’d done the deed into his hand, planning on throwing it at a passing car, only to be usurped by a particularly sloppy specimin, leaving him with no other option than to wipe it on his jeans.

We may never know.

The other ‘high’ point in his terrible pooing career came about during a household drinking session in my old gaff, where Marty was once again the victim of his own polite nature. Suddenly feeling the pinch after a night of tequila and various other drinks, Marty lifted himself carefully off the living room couch and made his way to the stairs to ascend to the bathroom, before being stopped in his tracks by a fresh faced young man named Chunk, who promptly started a conversation. Too polite to walk away, and too enamoured by alcohol to make the appropriate excuses to leave, Marty clung on for dear life before finally being allowed to rush off to finish what, sadly, had already started. Every second step on the stairs was blemished by a suspicious brown stain, and the underpants that suffered the outburst were disposed of via the medium of ‘throwing them over the garden wall’. Given the area we lived in at the time, this was probably more commonplace than you would think.

Nowadays, every time Marty spends more than 30 seconds away from the group, it’s presumed he’s had another mishap. We’re waiting for it to happen, and we’re long overdue some shit-based shenanigans.

The Shape-Thrower

He’s also famous for his dancing. Not wanting to offend the guy, who protects and covets his dancing ability, I’ll simply let the following pictures and videos do the talking:

Dancing Marty, Dancing

Dancing Marty, Dancing

Pete's guitar playing inspired a certain flatness in Marty's dancing.

Pete's guitar playing inspired a certain flatness in Marty's dancing.

It’s a unique dance, that crashes through cultural barriers and isn’t afraid of leaving casualties in it’s wake. (By that I mean there have been a fair few injuries caused to unsuspecting passers-by, struck by flailing limbs as they foolishly made their way across the dance floor).

Marty dancing in what was then called Roadkill, in Liverpool. This next one is one of the best videos I’ve ever seen. Excuse the poor sound, it was shot on an ancient mobile phone.

The Rogue

The cash machine incident may or may not be 100% true. From what I recall, he told us when he was drunk and has since been cagey on the details. Still, it’s become a running joke with him, so it’s worth a mention here as part of the ‘Marty Lore’. Rumour has it, that on a late-night/early-morning trip to a cash machine, Marty received a bl*wjob whilst with drawing cash. It was (he claims) from a lady he knew previously rather than say, a hooker…but that doesn’t stop us from speculating. Was it a stranger? Was it for money? Is he proud of himself for this? Was it a drunken outburst, tweaked by alcohol into something more than it was? Maybe, just maybe, it was auto-fellatio. (Feel free to continue the speculation in the comments).

We love Marty, despite all of this, but not quite as much as the man loves himself. I’ll leave you with this:

Marty thinks he's Zac Efron.

Marty thinks he's Zac Efron.

Yep.

by Chris | Posted in Life | 17 Comments » | Tags: ,
November 20th, 2009

The Future. Gimme.

It’s the future now, officially. Well, pretty much. So what the fuck happened?

When I was a kid, I used to think about what sort of stuff we’d have to play with by now. Personal spaceships and hoverboards and the like (I was a kid, what else would you expect). Except none of that has happened yet and we’re still driving around in regular old cars and I still don’t understand how skateboards work, nevermind flying ones that hover slightly off the ground. I fully blame TV for this, and also my tiny little idiot brain, because it isn’t capable or intelligent enough to invent such things. Fuck you, Brain. You thick bastard.

Of course, certain things do ‘feel’ like the future. This very internet ‘feels’ like the future and to a large degree it is. I can’t imagine life without it, and after a few days without it most people my age start climbing the walls or clubbing each other dead like cave-people. I have an iPhone and whilst it isn’t perfect, it looks and feels and acts like the future. Compared to, say, the Nokia Brick I had back in the day, the iPhone is a futuristic space phone from Space that does all sorts of spacey things. We have all sorts of stuff like this, objects that both enhance our lives minimally or in ways we don’t even notice. They fill gaps that didn’t exist 15-20 years ago. Or so I imagine…I don’t ever remember my Mother bemoaning the lack of an internet-enabled device that allowed the owner to speak to people all over the world whilst also watching porn on the toilet. When I get an email pop up I don’t think ‘ooh, that’s fantastic, that this small mix of plastic, metal and circuits is able to do this’, I just think ‘why did I even sign up for this newsletter?’ or ‘what do they want?’.

Where things have sprouted up to fill a gap we weren’t aware of, they haven’t gone far enough yet. My mp3 player doesn’t link to my mood, and play suitable music yet. It doesn’t automatically switch on and play soothing music into my ears whenever I’m stuck getting irate, listening to a thoroughly dull person witter on at me. It could also double as an alarm, for when my heart finally packs in out of laziness, it could detect that happening and react to it, letting people know I’ve just died and I’d like them to do something about it. Or it could play some Motorhead as it notices I’m starting to thump my last few beats, to jolt me back into life with a shot of musical adrenaline.

Death, too, seems far too prevalent in today’s society. Not for the old, infirm or generally under-healthed, but for those times when a promising young person (say, me) just drops dead for no real reason. Doctors should be able to skip back a bit, revive me (or whoever, preferably me) and have another go, atleast trying to figure out what the problem was.

(Please don’t let me die).

It’s the boring things that should have changed, rather then the things we didn’t even know we needed. Things like ironing. It’s dull as shit and everyone hates it…yet we’ve had to do it for years, in some form or another. Yes, the actual ‘ironing’ appliances have improved over the years and become more fancy, but in my mind that’s not enough. In this age where consumers will shell out fairly large amounts of money to save themselves time and effort, why do things like Irons still exist? There must be a better, quicker, lazier way, surely? As a race, have we not evolved past beating our own precious clothing with hot, heavy metal objects to get the creases out? I’m being lazy and pedantic, but I can’t think of a worse way (beside repeated painful sodomy) to waste a few hours than being stood ironing clothes.

Where things have improved, they’ve improved in pointless ways. Sure, dishwashers mean you don’t have to clean each individual dish yourself…but then you have to clean the dishwasher. And actually own a dishwasher. A personal slave is probably more financially viable, and you don’t have to clean those. Or, keen to avoid any accusation of racism (because people get jumpy when you say the ‘S’ word, even though I didn’t mean it that way) how about a Robot Butler? Even though they don’t exist. Why don’t they exist? This is the future, after all. This is the exact type of problem I’m facing.

Everything looks dull still, too. If you see a video clip from say, the 1970′s, the world still largely looks the same now as it did then, aside from the grainy-brown filter that video cameras used back then for some reason. Nowadays, in the future, I’d expect more chrome. Chrome everywhere. Chrome houses, cars, cats, pavements. I want my shiny future world, all slippy and slidey that I have to walk around in wearing shiny future suction shoes. What the f**k, scientists and designers? Where is it?

Whilst I’m on the subject, where the hell are the automatic doors in my house? The ones that go ‘whoosh’ then I walk past. Sentient ones that I can taunt, and argue with when they’re unruly or moody. Ones that will, if I treat them well, open up an escape route through my house in case of a fire whilst simultaneously fighting the flames. They could even rescue my Robot Butler.

November 16th, 2009

Vidja Games! A recent round-up.

Recent ones that I have bought, more specifically.

BRUTAL LEGEND

I picked up Brutal Legend a while ago, having been excited for a long while about the metal-centric game from the most under-rated games maker I can think of. Tim Schaffer has a long list of excellent-but-publicly-neglected games under his belt, from Full Throttle (which Brutal Legend feels like a spiritual successor to) to Psychonauts, one of the PS2-era’s greatest platformers. That absolutely no one bought. Honestly, I think it was just me and one other person who spent any amount of time with the game, digging up hidden spearheads for a reason that escapes me now.

But anyway, I’d expected great things from it. And, for about the first hour, I was getting them. The game is layered with neat little touches, and driving around in a powered-up go-kart is great. You will never tire of squashing small hedgehog-like creatures in your front bumper. Even if it means veering slightly off course in order to smack into one, it’s satisfying. But enough of my animal cruelty tendencies. The rest of the game is built nicely, right up to the point where the ‘Stage Battles’ begin. Then the fun stops. And it drags.

They involve a ‘stage’ being set up, which you more often than not have to defend. Sometimes the objective is to then attack a rivals stage, or a certain other structure, or blah blah blah. It’s annoyingly vague at times, leaving you flying about the battlefield with no idea what you’re supposed to do. It’s like an ill-thought-out cartoony RTS, covered in Jack Black sound bytes. The AI is patchy and the troops you create don’t have any specific strengths or weaknesses. At no point does it feel like you’re commanding a strong army, which is something the game needs to stop players feeling like they’re just going through the motions.

It’s sad, because the rest of the game is quite fun, give or take the odd repetitive side-mission. The story is suitably OTT and the obvious love poured into the game makes it endearing to play, giving you reason to persevere. It’s just a shame that the same love also spurts out of the gaping, ugly orifices that are the Stage Battles. They just make a mess that can’t easily be cleaned.

BORDERLANDS

Like the rest of the games in this list, I’ve barely touched it. But first impressions are good. It is, as far as I can see, a Fallout 3 clone with lots of guns, running and much-needed co-op. Without co-op, it’s dull, but even a simple running-from-here-to-there mission becomes fun from taking pot-shots at your accomplices. Even running around, competing to gather loot is fun. My only fear is that all of this might wane quite quickly, leaving a boring, repetitive game that I barely touch. I’ll update you when I’ve played it more, in the form of a fuller review like the one for Brutal Legend.

DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS

I’m four hours in to this supposed 80-hour epic (which will probably turn into something like 120-hours due to my propensity to check every little corner of every map) and no one has even mentioned dragons yet. What the hell, Dragon Age? More like Dragon-less Age. Eh Eh Eh.

I’m hoping that things change sharpish, because it’s started off well. It’s similar to Mass Effect but missing the guns and ramping up the amount of controllable war-dogs available to the player. The dog is awesome. He bites people and it’s awesome. So far, the game seems lacking in anything especially interesting, but it’s still strangely engrossing. He type of game that’ll start to bloom around the 10-15 hour mark, I assume. Bye bye life.

 

GTA4 – BALLAD OF GAY TONY

After the boring, trudge through GTA4, which I completed but can remember almost nothing about, and the even-more-dreary ride-a-bike-em’up of add-on Lost and the Damned comes the game that every wants. It’s loud, it’s brightly coloured, it’s splattered in innuendo humour and it’s essentially  GTA: San Andreas. IE – It’s fun. One of the first missions involves stealing a helicopter, blowing up a boat and flying off. All for a crazed man voiced by Omid Djali. Compare this to the first hundred missions of Lost and The Damned, which involved driving around a bit and making a nice little pattern with your motorbikes before shooting someone, getting bored and switching the Xbox off. It’s GTA, the way it should be.

MACHINARIUM

Short review this one: it’s great to look at, it’s art style is exceptional and the little robot thing is cute. But I got to the third screen, spent 15 minutes making a mine cart fly off it’s tracks, then switched it off because it was making me feel stupid. If I go back to it and it makes me feel any differently, I’ll jot my thoughts down. Right now I’m labelling it as pompous to make my stupid brain feel better.

OTHERS

I’m half-interested in a few others, like Modern Warfare 2 and Left 4 Dead 2, but either cash or time restraints have prevented me from actually getting hold of them. Really, any game I buy between now and January is just going to end up as a time waster until I get my grubby little mitts on Mass Effect 2.

November 9th, 2009

Lookeehere, I’m writing about me. Me!

Wow. I’ve not done one of these in ages. My reader (whoever you are) will be disa-fucking-pointed in me. My mum, if she read this, would be disappointed that I swore so needlessly. Truth is, I’ve been busy. Way too busy to issue personal missives into Internetland in the hopes of something happening with it and making life slightly more interesting.

The reasons for my busy-ness can mostly be interpreted as laziness which I can’t excuse, or videogames which I also can’t excuse but maybe could write about and therefore justify. I’ll do this in a sec, on another post, so hold tight. This one is more bloggy and for that I apologise.

Another reason I’ve neglected this site (and also

www.crowdsurfer.net, to Liam’s dismay) is because I’ve been writing a book, and I’m insisting on calling it ‘a book’ even though it’s more like an OpenOffice file full of words that will almost certainly never materialise into a book. But it’s still my book, and probably the only thing I’ve written that could stand on it’s own as such. The zombie book I’ve been writing on-off for what feels like a decade (but is only actually around half of that) wouldn’t work because it’s humour is very specific to me and I’m not funny. It could work as a movie, because it could rely on cheap visual gags to get over the crippling disability of the story and characters, but as a ‘Read-y’ it’s broken.

My new ‘book’ is about a Superhero, named Superhero Man, and it’s not really about a Superhero at all. He just happens to be one. I considering using his Superhero-status to work in an allegory for the problems people face in everyday life, but I only thought of this after I’d already written most of it and realised I could probably twist things that way. It isn’t deep or meaningful, and I’m not that intelligent, but if I can cram some faux-psychology into it then by Jeeves I will.

It’s happened quite naturally really, though I wasn’t expecting it to end up like this. It started life as a short story to entertain a girl and pass some time in work about 2 months ago and is now 70 pages long and growing by about two pages a day and I’m making it up as I go along. It’s fun, and I don’t think it’s terrible. The only person to read it and give me feedback so far is Mick. He said it could easily be a kids book, which I’m taking as a compliment to it’s whimsical nature, but the second half of the book is full of murder and swearing so maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea. Unless kids these days like murder and swearing, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll throw in some knife-crime and aim it at 10 year olds. We’ll see.

It’s taken over everything else I was writing, and I’m eager to finish it so I can get back to writing about zombies and my uninformed opinions about everything the world is doing wrong, but also because I want to print it out and send it to people I know and force them to read it. I might even tie people up and read it on stage in a monotone voice, like Vogon poetry. If I keep people tied up long enough and read it enough times I might be able to induce some sort of Stockholm Syndrome situation whereby everyone present ends up loving me and my book about a Superhero, turning it into the best selling book in that particular room. It’s all about the little victories.

Though realistially I’ll probably post it here when I’m done, to avoid the legal minefield of kidnappings and molestation (if I’m going to kidnap you, I may as well).

If you are reading this, and you happen to know a publisher with lots of money and terribly quality control, give them my email address.

Or, if you’d just like to read it, ask me. Could do with the feedback.

Excelsior!

 














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