Author: Ian “Air Travel Regulations” McIver

Avatar Fraternity of Zingers

It was inevitable. You know how funny we are, right? How right on the fashions we are when it comes to news, pop culture and, indeed, fashion itself. It was only a matter of time before our amusing jokes about Kevin stretched into the cosmos and all and sundry (sundry, indeed) were swallowed up in the process. Take no prisoners because the Fraternity of Zingers is officially open.

I could stand in the corner, cracking off zingers like they were toffees, but it’s not going to change anything. I need a brotherhood who have got my back to help me spread the good word, the good humour and the good times involved with zingers. Who doesn’t love a good zinger? They’re fast, funny and fruity like the best kind of sandwich. woman. Bring me a big fat plate of fruity zingers so I can chow down like the rest. I want to take my fill of the choicest cuts and you can too.

There’s no paperwork involved. You don’t need to officially sign up like you would for a Direct Debit. All I need to know is if you’re in for the wild ride. All I need from you is confirmation that you want to be part of a family, the closest damn family you’ll ever have. When you crack off a zinger about the news I’ll be right beside you, cracking one back about haircuts or gardening.

A bell in the bush is worth two in the hand, after all.

Even if you’re not particularly hilarious you can still join, we want you! You will learn from the best and under our sweaty wings you will rise the ranks of the Zinger Elite.

Are you with me? Hyper Gamma Meta Zing Zing.

Avatar Valentine’s Day Done Right

Valentine’s Day is on the horizon and you are going to get smothered in smushy, awful paraphernalia whether you like it or not. As a single man I remain immune to the charms of it (which is a mantra I repeat to myself when I’m crying into my cornflakes) but there are others who will have to fall in line. When I say fall in line I mean buy as many presents as possible for your significant other. I know what you’re thinking though, there is something missing and you can’t quite put your finger on it. There’s a romantic meal for two waiting in the wings yet you still haven’t found the right thing to finish it off.

What you need is something to seal that deal in that wigwam, you know the one I’m referring to. How do you tart that three course menu up in a timely manner without breaking the bank? You need Kevindo Menendez’s Love Baubles.

‘Love Baubles‘

Hand-crafted from the most sensuous part of the pig, the eyelids, Kevindo Menendez’s Love Baubles are what are missing from your Valentine’s Day; a dozen mouth-watering spheres of sweaty, meaty goodness generously licked with the mystery of our seventeen individual spices. Guaranteed to lighten and brighten up the most abysmal of romantic meals, you can prepare them any way you like.

‘Love Baubles’

With one or two of these in their mouth, your girlfriend, wife, boyfriend or significant other won’t be tempted to break up with you. He or she won’t believe the taste sensation going down his or her throat. It is the perfect aphrodisiac to put everyone, and I do mean everyone, in the mood for love.

‘Love Baubles’

You will be the king or queen of the love ball. Your partner will rescind into sexual bliss. Crack off a couple of these and you won’t need those petrol station flowers you were planning to buy at the last minute. Do us all a favour and purchase Kevindo Menendez’s Love Baubles.

‘Love Baubles’ ‘Love Baubles’ ‘Love Baubles’ ‘Love Baubles’

Fill up your trolleys and your stomachs. It’s got the Kevindo Menendez guarantee! Available in both the freezer and seasonal aisles at all good local supermarkets.

Avatar Patch Stars

In response to a recent confusion as to who was the female singer with the eye-patch, I decided to see how other pop stars would look like with an eye-patch.

This week we take a look at Lisa Stansfield:

You can tell it’s Lisa Stansfield because of the beauty spot and the obligatory curls in the hair. The front cover of the album ‘Affliction’ was already in black and white, and with the additional hat and ringlets it does make her look more like a pirate. Significantly more than Gabrielle ever did.

I didn’t colour her shirt in because that would have been too much dark and shade. She does look a bit like a ghost.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what Mancunian music pixie Lisa Stansfield would look like with only one eye then wonder no more.

I did try to upload this as a .pdf document but I was denied, DENIED, as though I was common riff raff trying to find enough change for a loaf of bread.

Avatar Spoon Amnesty

This is an appeal by me on behalf of me.

As you are all (?) probably aware of by now, I have moved into my own place and whilst this is the best thing that has happened to me for absolutely ages it has meant a bit of a wake up call. No longer are all the THINGS at my disposal that most people take for granted. Occasionally I go to look for something and remember that I don’t have it, or it’s on the list to be gotten in the near future.

Gradually, I am getting there but there is something quite shocking that I need to bring to your attention. I need spoons.

You may laugh however I am in dire straits. Kev’s wife’s mother (tenuous link at the best of times) only gave me 34 spoons when I first moved in. When I asked for more they looked at me and laughed, like a set of common goons. I pleaded, begged for anything else they could give me. When they told me no I excused myself and snuck through into the kitchen in the hope of pilfering some of theirs. The drawers were locked though; no more spoons for me.

When Emma visited the flat she bought me a couple of items for moving in, one of which was a cutlery set. This very lovely yet very basic package only had 4 teaspoons and 4 tablespoons. I told her it wasn’t enough, that more were needed and she looked at me as though I was a crazed hermit, picking up empty tins in the hope of finding money. When I ordered her to take a taxi to the nearest late-night spoon vendor she pretended to take a phone call and hurried away.

Daily deliveries of spoons are coming in. It’s not enough though, I need more. More than more. If there is a bigger value than more then that is what I need. I went door to door, asking for more, from my new neighbours. Most of them slammed the doors in my face. “No spoons today”, they announced before giving me a face full of wood. Shocking to say the least.

Please, if you have any measure of kindness in your bare bones, give me all the god damn spoons you have right now. In your pockets, in your drawers, at your parents’ house, I don’t care how you get them but hand or send them to me before I run out. Who knows what will happen when I’m left spoonless, a mere shell of a man eating cereal with a fork

Avatar Grapes – The Right Time

Put them down right now.

Take your lump of grapes and put them back in the fridge. Stop enjoying them. Do you realise you could be putting your life at risk by eating them at the wrong time?

I know that grapes may look very harmless but that’s what they want you to think. Vicious killers they are. Well, maybe not killers; vicious little things they are. If you start pushing them down your face hole then all manner of things could go wrong. Let me ease you into the potential minefield of grape eating by telling you what you need to know. Here’s a helpful guide:

  1. Make sure you run them under some rubbing alcohol, or possibly some chlorine, before putting them in your mouth.
  2. Only eat even numbers of grapes.
  3. Do not eat them after 8:30pm. The optimum grape eating time is between 7:30 and 8:00pm, with a tiny window of opportunity available shortly thereafter. If you try to eat grapes after this then no matter how much you chew them they will reform in your stomach and come out whole, like sweetcorn but bigger. Unless you want to start pooing out little green nuggets you check the time first, young ‘un.
  4. Do not eat grapes in the morning. You will look weird and wrong.
  5. When you are done eating the grapes put the stalk in the microwave for thirty seconds then throw it out the nearest window. This will appease the Grape Apes and they will not lay siege to your house.

Please listen to my advice as I have been studying grapes for years now, almost decades, and I know what I’m talking about. I am currently a ‘Food Botherer’ however it has come to my attention that certain people may be doing it wrong and I take great care in handing out useful information when I can.

Avatar The More You Know – The Chris Explosion

It’s been floated around for some time now and there’s been an awful lot of confusion as to what happens. You know what I’m referring to; that urban myth that has been haunting this website for as long as I or anyone else can remember. Legend says that if Chris Marshall watches a film, any movie whether short, black and white, foreign or animated, he will explode.

You may laugh at such a premise but it is true. A genuine medical condition that only affects one in twenty million, ‘Brewster Explodius’ came to light during the middle of the twentieth century. The first recorded case was a Clarice Mucklesniff, a 26 year old waitress from North Dakota. She was going to the movies with her boyfriend and less than five minutes into the opening credits she exploded. Her bits were catapulted across the theatre, landing mostly in the aisles bar her arms which landed in the lap of an elderly couple towards the front. Since then there have been multiple cases all over the world of this unfortunate illness.

So we move to our current case, Christopher “Christopheles” “Sausage and Cheese Isosceles” Jimmy Jam-Jam Marshall. Poor Chris has been living with this for most of his life. It was lucky that a friend of the family, who is au fait with these kinds of medical conditions, was able to diagnose him before the worst could happen. In order for us to understand more, we need a hypothetical situation:

A HYPOTHETICAL SITUATION:

Chris has had a hard day at work. He’s taken off his feather boa and decides to relax on the sofa before making some food. As he picks up the remote to browse some channels, the TV opens on that bit in ‘Cocoon’ where the old people get in the pool with the aliens and have a pool party. 

  1. His eyes witness the film on the screen. The retinal pools record the information and turns it into some weird shapes and colours, possibly resembling cats. This makes it easier to send it up the pipe shaft.
  2. The information travels up the pipe shaft, past the nosal tubes, towards the front part of the brain, more commonly known as the Gluco-chaffinch. Here it is split into several nixtoglands and sent to the seven corners of the human mind.
  3. For a normal person this would be fine; the nixtoglands would reach their destination and everyone would feel great. Several people would do backflips. For Chris though this is the beginning of the end. When the seven corners are activated it causes the multo peak in the glorbo cells to light up. 
  4. Now it is only a matter of time. The blood pumps up into his face muscles which only accelerates the process. The glorbo cells chat to the peanuke rittles causing a chain reaction between the two, meaning a complex chemical implosion that reverses around the maypole and turns back into an explosion. 
  5. It goes off. His head catapults to the ceiling. His noses fires off into the kitchen. The eyes don’t make it that far and the ears flop to the floor. The body doesn’t move from the position, it’s still enjoying the film.

I don’t need to tell you that this cannot happen, ever, mainly for my sake because then it’ll mean I’ll be down one friend and will need to hold auditions for a new one to fill the position. Do you know how long that’ll take? Far too long. Please keep my friend safe and never show him any films.

Avatar New Job – Food Botherer

The list of my previous professions is as long as any of Kev’s shopping lists from ‘B & Q’ when he was back in the glory days of daily updates to his house. It got so bad that rather than daily deliveries they just built a B & Q Warehouse next to his ever-expanding mansion and wheeled whatever he needed over the road. That’s service for you.

My new job was thrust upon me by someone else though. For once I have not chosen it for myself, it was a gift from a friend. Who was it? I can’t remember, either Tom or Kev. That part isn’t important, look at me will you?

So we are all sat around the local Harvester having a swell old time eating some free salad and swapping stories about how mental our respective kids are. When the main food arrives everyone, or mostly everyone, sets about stuffing the chow down their gullets. I got my chops around a tasty piece of gammon with both (controversial in some parts) egg and pineapple. Some of our party however were a little reluctant to indulge. How does one convince a child of a young age to stop titting about and start eating? There are a number of ways, some good and some bad. The best way, so it would seem, is to threaten the child with me.

“If you don’t eat your food up, Uncle Ian will start eating it himself and you don’t want that now, do you?”

Do I really want some lukewarm cheesy pasta, possibly scattered with a smattering of phlegm and sneezed upon? No. Do I like the fact that I am now being flaunted as some kind of food boogie monster? Yes, very much so. Whilst initially being a little hesitant to accept the role now handed to me like a hand grenade made of poisoned spikes, I am willing to take that box of beans and run the rest of the way. I can finally command the kind of respect I have been looking for all these years, through a mix of fear and abject misery. They will concoct a rhyme about my exploits. I will be looking over the shoulder of every stubborn eater, with my mouth open and a fork poised, ready to strike when they lean back to take a little rest.

YES! Hear my name and fear my shadow. I am coming for your half-eaten burgers, your shunned lasagne and garlic bread, your unhappy quiche and ignored leftover pizza. I am coming for you.

“You dare not leave your plate alone,
He’s creeping up like a silent drone,
With eyes of fire and stomach of steel,
He’s coming to take your unguarded meal!”

Avatar James Earl Jones is Amazing

Do you know who’s amazing? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not you or I. Nor I. No, neither of us is amazing. You can show me all your achievements, medals, awards and dissertations but you will never be as amazing as James Earl Jones.

This will be difficult for some of us to understand (i.e. Chris) due to the fact that some of us cannot watch films for fear of exploding. That said, James Earl Jones, or JEJ as he is known to his closest friends and family, has also has a stuperbulous career on both television and on stage, so you’ve got no excuses some people. He is a huge talent and has played everyone from a man covered in black plastic to a huge lion and even read all 27 books of the New Testament in ‘James Earl Jones Reads the Bible’. I know now what everyone is getting for Christmas…

I have a ton of respect for James because he’s always been there in lots of things, lots of things I have enjoyed which is a rarity these days. I almost fell off the sofa though when I paused a film he was in and this came up:

Immature, juvenile, yes yet also immensely satisfying and hugely enjoyable. I think James Earl Jones looks even cooler with walrus tusks. Walrus tusks or sticks of chalk coming out of his nose. He can pull off any look, he’s that good an actor.