...I doubt I'll even say the word 'cunt' once).

CHEESEBURGER CAKE

Being my friend occasionally has its perks. Sometime I do stupid things for your amusement…and this is a fine example.

With Sam’s birthday coming up, and her being a fellow burg enthusiast, I planned to make her a kick-ass birthday cake. Then I did make her a kick-ass birthday cake (with help from my dear ol’ Mum, who is boss).

Because I forgot to take photos at the start, here’s a picture of about half way through the process…

This is the top, which is just sponge cake with icing wrapped around it with jam there to hold it in place. Or something. I’m not sure why there was jam but it was fine anyway.

Next up is the bottom, which was chocolate cake, and the actual burger. Which was also chocolate cake, but trimmed in melted Nutella.

There’s also chips, made of chunks of diabetes-giving icing. Mmm!

This is mostly done, now. The lettuce and tomato is just more icing coloured with terrific E-numbers, and the splodge on the top is buttercream. Honest.

THEN CHEESE HAPPENED. Not real cheese, obviously, that’d be weird – more coloured icing.

Then, you put the top bit from before on the bottom bit just above, add some brown powder stuff to make it look a bit burnt, throw on some Sesame Seeds, et voilà:

It looks ace, rots your teeth, and tastes amazing. You might be able to tell I had very little to do with the construction of it beyond the basic idea and the icing bits, but still. I suppose if anyone wants a better recipe for it, ask me and I’ll find it out.

Oh, one more thing…it’s worth noting that it’s a motherfucker to cut up into slices…

It feels like almost every day that I’m out, I’ll be driving down a road minding my own business, and see some sort of idiot wandering in the middle of the road, or playing a game of frogger without any extra lives.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people walking across the road without trekking to the nearest crossing. I don’t even have a problem doing the ridiculous tightrope act of balancing on the white line in the center of the road with cars whizzing past either side. Anyway, down to the problems with pedestrians.

Just because I am not currently in that lane, doesn’t mean it’s an extension of the pavement.
I see this all too often. You’re driving down in the outside lane, maybe because you’ve just pulled around a parked car or had to swerve around a pedestrian, and then out walks a guy deciding to cross the road. He knows you’re there, because he’s walking slowly into the inside lane watching you pass. As soon as you get just past the point of killing the guy, you’re now allowed to pull back into the inside lane.
If I was to drive with 2 wheels on the kerb just because the pedestrians were only using the inside of the pavement, I don’t think many people would be happy. If you walk out into the inside lane waiting for a car to pass, and they pull back into the inside lane and drive straight into you, it’s your fault. Get the hell out of the road while you can see cars coming.

Things behind you still exist.
This seems like an unusual thing to need to point out, but it arises a lot. I mentioned earlier the trick of walking half way across the road, then sucking in your stomach so you can fit within the confines of the little white line. It’s all well and good, if you’re not in a really stupid place and getting in everyones way, but you need to be ON the line. If you can see the line in front of you, you may well be safe from the cars in the lane you’re approaching, but you’re still standing in the way of traffic going the other way.

If you’re on the road, face the oncoming traffic.
If you absolutely have to walk down the road, and not the pavement, then do everyone a favour and face the oncoming traffic. That way you can see them, and it should hopefully stop you wandering out into their path like a drunk.

Genius Safety Campaign from Preston

The general attitude with regards to pedestrians is to tell cars to slow down incase they hit someone. I’ve not once seen a sign aimed at pedestrians saying “Don’t walk out into the road infront of cars”, but I’ve seen plenty of signs aimed at cars saying “Watch out for people walking out infront of cars”. The TV adverts produced by the Government as THINK! are all aimed at driving slower so that when someone does run aimlessly into the road flailing their arms and jibbering, you won’t kill them, just hurt them. This can only lead to more people flailing their way into the road, due to the lack of consequence.

I suggest more adverts are made from the point of view of the idiot who runs into the road. Showing them how painful it can be, and how sad their friends will be when they die etc, instead of trying to guilt trip people into driving slower. I don’t understand how someone decided it’s better to advertise “You’ll feel bad if you run someone over” over “You’ll be dead if you run in front of a car”. I know which one would motivate me more.

Stop using your child in it’s pram as some kind of blind man’s cane
Yes, I actually have to mention this one too. If there is an obstruction stopping you from seeing the traffic, it’s understandable that you would need to get closer to the edge of the road to look. If you’re pushing a pram, that’s already ahead of you, much closer to the edge of the road. When you step forwards to the curb, with the pram proudly shoved ahead of you, it’s in the road. You know, that road which you couldn’t see, that road who’s traffic levels you were unable to judge. That road with the fucking cars on it that you’re shoving your baby into. Yeah, that road.

Stand next to the pram, stand in front of the pram, turn around and pull the pram backwards for a few seconds, I don’t care, but don’t try using the unwitting child’s soft undeveloped skull to stop a car. It’s unlikely to work.

If you step out in front of my car, and dent it, I will expect you to pay to have it fixed
Now you may be more damaged than the car, and I understand it may take a little bit of time before you’re back on your feet, but I don’t want impression of your face in my near-side wing.
For some reason, I’d be seen as the bad guy for this.  If I dived through your window head first, you wouldn’t be seen as the bad guy if you prosecuted or wanted the window replacing. I don’t understand why that doesn’t apply to someone diving head first into a moving car.

In the words of Douglas Adams;
“Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?”
“How much?”
“None at all.”

So get out of the fucking road if you don’t know how to use it.

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She’s going to eat too many sweet and throw up all over me/the dog. With Hilarious Consequences.

She’s going to go missing. With Hilarious Consequences.

I’m going to be in horrible over my depth. With Hilarious Consequences.

I’d have called it “With Hilarious Consequences”.

I’ve looked into it, and any kind of restraints for a full day is illegal and against her tiny little human rights. My problem is that she’s too quick, and she knows her house better than I do. I don’t know if there’s a way into some sort of crawl space between the walls, but she will. My day tomorrow will likely end in a country-wide manhunt, and she’ll just be sat in the shed all along, playing with the power tools. My day will end with my parents returning home to a fresh-faced, wide-awake little sister and me, covered in my own blood and dirt, falling asleep at the dining table.

With Hilarious Consequences.

As I reached for the cheesesticks, feeling somewhat superior that my drunken desciples were hanging off my every word, my reality was inexplicably ravaged down from upon the charismatic cloud my bragging had elevated it to.

‘Well, I just don’t see what you could possibly write about all the time Marty. How do you keep readers coming back every week’?

That was a sudden slice of sobriety I could have done without.

As we grabbed our coats and headed into the bitter evening air I started to do what no aspiring writer should ever do, I started to THINK!

When it all comes undone, i’m rather like any other single, caucasian male  hurtling towards that most maudlin of milestones ‘Thirty’! I’m still as foolhardy and frustratingly forlorn as I was a decade ago. I can be found frequenting the very same dankhole bars I probably should have outgrown midway through the ‘noughties’ and, perhaps most depressingly of all, I am still an underappreciated, nah, underachieving office Monkey who makes his own lunch everyday as a cost-cutting exercise and wears Captain America briefs to convince himself he is still, y’know, a ‘zany’ type of guy. Shirley was right, what on earth did I have to say that anybody would ever have the slightest shred of interest in? Worse still, how was I even going to convince my friends to tune into my latest entry? My confidence was shot, the unthinkable had happened: I’d lost the power to boast!

The next couple of nights consisted of tossing and turning and panic-stricken scribbling that resulted only in nonsensical noodlings so awkward it could have been torn straight from an adolescent Adrian Mole diary. This was quite a slump. What the hell was I going to do?

Then, it hit me. OF COURSE! I had a wealth of wisdom that was just waiting to be tapped into. A set of stories so scintillating, so spectacularly scandalous that I could dine out on it for months. All I had to do was lift the lid on one of the most embarrasing episodes of my young life thus far. I guess  enough time had passed to share with the World (Wide Web) MY TRAVEL DIARY!

For you see dear reader, I spent ten monumental months entertaining guests from all over Europe as part of an Animacion team in the enviable location of Spain. My time there was unquestionably the most adventurous journey, not to mention an unprecedented period of self discovery, that I have ever had the pleasure to undertake. Needless to say it was also inhabited by a cast of characters, unsavoury serpents and weird and wonderful wimseys. A troupe of theatrical treasures you very seldom have the chance to cross during the rather dull nine to five existence.

I hereby officially announce the commencement of a five-part mini series, my account of those heady hedonistics right here at ‘OnlyBees’.

So if you’d like to learn about how I was almost killed by Spanish gangsters, my days spent in Canarian crack dens, my brief romances with German goddesses and Slovakian princesses, how I was touched inappropriately by a five foot homosexual choreographer or the night I finally got to see my idols Boney M perform ‘Daddy Cool’ stay tuned to ‘ONLYBEES’.

Episode one to follow…

Ciao bella

Marty!

He’s accidentally locked in a room alone, with his colleague and girlfriend panicking outside. There’s even a little countdown clock, dripping the seconds away to his impending doom. He’s screaming, shouting, banging on the 6-inch-thick glass and generally waving his arms in an effort to, I dunno, take flight or something. Men in white lab coats are dashing about outside. Then nothing much happens, except he’s zapped away and crumbles to dust in a glorious flash of blue. Later, he’s powerful and yadda yadda but it got me thinking.

Having been raised on comics and science fiction etc, I don’t think I’d panic in quite the same way if I found myself trapped in some sort of experiment about to go wrong. I’d assume I’d come out of it at the other end with atleast some sort of useful superpower.

Example 1. Doc Ock, atleast in Spiderman 2, was given huge powerful arms by an experiment . Granted, he really pissed that opportunity into the wind by annoying Spider-Man and practically handing control of his body over to the arms (which was his own fault for putting the inhibitor chip in a prominent place next to a sign that said “Don’t smash this chip please thanks”), but HUGE POWERFUL ARMS. METAL ONES. THAT YOU COULD CLIMB BUILDINGS WITH. I’d go for that.

Example 2. The Hulk. Who is awesome. Who wouldn’t want that?

Most well-known superheroes are the result of some sort of scientific or medical accident/experiment gone awry. So being in such a situation wouldn’t be the end of the world. Well, unless the experiment caused the end of the world, but that’s a different story. It wouldn’t usually be immediate atleast, giving you time to hone your new found power and have a bit of a play about.

Worst case scenario? Sandman. Who, erm, gained all the fantastic power of Sand. Or Daredevil who, although not exactly the result of an experiment, was made slightly less blind and shoved into a pansy red suit. I know he can’t exactly see it, but you’d think someone would tell him he looks daft. Like a special kid who’s allowed to dress himself, and leaves the house wearing nothing but orange stockings and a cape.

Even Dr Gordon Freeman, in the game Half-Life, comes out of his huge scientifical disasterpiece a fucking hero. He doesn’t die horribly, he gets zapped about the universe a bit, then grabs a crowbar and gets fucking busy. He went from boring scientist, shoving carts into boxes at the behest of some disembodied voice, to being SUPER AWESOME COOL MAN and smashing head-crabs like it ain’t no thang. He was even able to keep his silly little beard.

Even if you die, completely and utterly, there’s still the chance someone might rebuild you with *SCIENCE* and make you stronger. Your body might have been fused with incredible amounts of Superidium, or whatever.

In short, if you want to be a hero, get yourself to a lab and hang around a bit. Poke some things. Stick your head where you shouldn’t. Even if you only come out of it with something like a giant hand, it’s still a giant hand. Fer smashin’.

There are a few things I believe every human being should own, ‘just in case’. On the off-chance they might come in useful one day. They’re not important objects, but they’re things that might improve your life immensely, even if it’s only for an hour or two.

I’m calling this theory ‘The Airhorn Principle’, and it applies to a great many things.

 
The Airhorn

Let’s start with it’s name-sake, the airhorn. The only possible reason to own one of these is attract attention to something. More often than not, that ‘something’ will be the person you’re about to absolutely terrify with a blast from the airhorn. It’s otherwise completely useless, and it may sit and gather dust for months on end. Until the time comes.

It might be a sleeping housemate, or an unsuspecting shopper browsing the bread aisle in Asda. It might be a lonely man, slowly raising his pint to his lips at the end of a long, hard day. (Note: ‘honking’ the last one might get you beaten up, so beware). From this perspective, the Airhorn’s possibilities are endless.

Regardless of the target, an airhorn will improve that hour of your life. It’s never not funny. Whether the man simply turns around and calls you a cunt, or drops to the floor, writhing in the midst of a cardiac arrest, you’ll still laugh. Even a total non-reaction from the target is funny.

 
Megaphone

This is almost the same as the airhorn, but with one important difference: The loud, blaring noise can be almost anything you want it to be. As a comedy prop, it’s invaluable. Even the unfunniest line from the shittiest comedy would be funnier if the speaker suddenly screamed it through a megaphone. It’s practically science.

The Megaphone is just one of those things that’d be handy to have. They even come in small, portable sizes that you can clip for your belt, for on-the-go screaming. At a BBQ? Is the garden a bit crowded, blocking your path to yet another hot dog? “HOT DOG PLEASE!” you can shout to the cook. He’ll hear you. You’ll get your fucking hot dog. Crowded bar, struggling to be served ahead of the kind of bell-end who relishes ‘shoving in’? Megaphone. Easy.

So come on, reclaim the megaphone from those crazy street-preachers.

 
Chainsaw

Just the act of buying a Chainsaw will give any man a warm feeling in their rock-hard erection. Almost anything from a DIY shop will, actually. It’s just such a manly thing to do.

It doesn’t even matter what you use it for.

“This tree needs to come down. I’ll get my Chainsaw.”

“There’s a bit of thread hanging off your sleeve. Hang on, I’ll fetch my Chainsaw.”

Also, it’ll turn out to be incredibly handy come the dawn of the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Don’t be caught short – get yourself a chainsaw.

There are more, but you get the idea. Paintball gun, BB gun, Spraypaint, a dog with the face of Roy Orbison. It’s all good.

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