The last moment of March

This is what you get for posting in the last hours of the month.

Oh, sure, we’ve all done it. You think you’ve got a few more days to make another post, and then wham! It’s the 31st already and the minutes are running out. It’s like Geoffrey Chaucer himself put it: the Bean Counter waits for no man.

Anyway, I felt like I was on safe ground. The one year anniversary of the last podcast post had been and gone, and up my sleeve I had a nice little routine to post. It was going to be a transcript of a “missing” podcast episode. Stage directions indicating scuffling noises and someone eating something crinkly, a false start to asking a question, someone mishearing something. The subject would be along the lines of “what’s the longest you’ve had to wait for the next episode of something?”.

Anyway, I hadn’t written it yet, but in preparation I listened to Gravestones on my way home from work. That would be about two hours ago. In the intervening two hours, Kev has only gone and put another podcast up, hasn’t he? Unbelievable.

So the wind has been comprehensively extracted from my sails. Never mind. There’s four minutes of March left, so I will change course quite abruptly. It’s been a fairly middling day at the end of a fairly rough week, and this made me laugh. Let’s all watch this. Here’s to better times, and silliness, and listening to a new podcast episode on the way to work tomorrow. Thanks Kev. Even if it threw a spanner right in my stupid works.

Shrimp!

We have fish, we’ve had them a while but recently we had to move the tank out of the playroom to make room for Lego to be displayed. We didn’t really have anywhere else for them to go, so they went into the kitchen, and because its a kitchen the only place for them is in the window.

Apparently in a window isn’t the ideal place for a fish tank, as there’s too much light so christ knows how fish cope in nature. After a few weeks, sure enough we’ve started to get some algae growth in the water… whats the best way to deal with algae in a tank? Move it out of the sunlight? Chemicals? Nope, apparently its shrimp.

More impressive when you look up how to buy shrimp, is that you can buy them off eBay… through the post… alive.

I know, its mental. So say hello to “Wiggles” and “Swimmy Shrimpy”, named by the kids naturally…

ABOFB 32: Conspiracy Theories

A Breath of Fresh Beans returns triumphantly after only 371 days since the last episode. We’re still ploughing through the wealth of recordings made during the various Covid-19 lockdowns, so its still technically series 4.

Anyway, we burst back into your ears to discuss:

Finland
Paul McCartney
Popcorn
Tinned Bears

Please note (a rebuttal)

Hello patrons of ‘Sleazy like a Sunday Morning’ (Nantwich).

We would like to thank you for your years, months, weeks or even minutes of patronage. Every time you walk through that door you help me and the girls out such a great deal.

You may or may not be aware that we have recently had a refurbishment and changed certain parts of the club to bring everything more up to date, an aesthetic sheen that hasn’t been seen since the turn of the century. I loved the previous look but I wanted to show a different side to Sleazy’s. After a few meetings with the business partners we decided on two very different looks: one that was modern, sleek and sexy and the other that was sexy, old, and gothic.

The dancefloor and booths are still there, you need not worry. They have been deep-cleaned and bleached to within an inch of their lives. Voice-activated sensors have been added to the toilets so when you say, “flush” the urinals will flush. The bar stools have had a new height of seat added to them (big high!) for those who are vertically-challenged.

The extension at the back, however, is where the temperature has really been cranked up. Have you ever had fantasies about being a knight, a jester or even a king in medieval England? Now you can indulge as much as you want in ‘Ye B-olde England’, the sexiest thing to come out of Nantwich since Thea Gilmore started writing music. We have everything: ale, shouting, stripping, girls, mead, laughter, outfits, dysentery, ornamental owls, women, private parties, stocks and much, much more. If you really want to prove your worth then you need to pick up your sword (not a euphemism) and try to slay the Slaggon™, a mechanical dragon who is giving out everything as long as the price is right. I have built everything myself and I stand by my efforts and the choice of my customers to do what they like (within reason) for a reasonable price.

What I will not stand for though is theft. I have recently discovered that the sign for our new event has been stolen by one of those themed restaurants in the neighbouring town of Crewe. They deliberately took our sign, knowing that it was the wrong one, to drum up interest for their business. They made up some phoney baloney story about being sent the wrong sign to curry favour and get more punters through the door. I hear that they’re doing a roaring trade as a result of this. To begin with I was nice about it and requested the sign be returned only to be met with indifference and mild threats.

The Slaggon™ does exist, and she is ready to take you on whenever you’re ready, but only at my establishment. I want you to know that personally, therefore I take the time to reiterate the following:

You can hire the Slaggon™.
You can ride the Slaggon™.
You can take the Slaggon™ out to your uncle’s pub, which is only a few miles away, and do what you like as long as you pay the dry cleaning fee afterwards.

The sign is yet to be returned. For now let us all have a drink, maybe a dance, and hope that it will be returned. It is, after all, the principle of the matter more than anything else. Cheers!

Sharkitect

I had a vision last night. It was clear and it was pure.

As I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, I imagined a world where things were made from sharks. Not from shark meat or shark skin or anything weird like that, no no, everything is made from sharks. Buildings built from sharks, stacked metres high, riding up into the sky and beyond. Cars made from sharks where drivers wrap a luxurious shark tongue seatbelt around themselves and pull away in the latest Ford SHARK, a marked improvement from the previous year’s model, the Ford Shark.

Who would build these marvellous machines and inventions? Who would have the skills with which to satisfy the demands of the general public? I would be their saviour. I would be their sharkitect.

How gutted was I then when I looked into the matter and discovered that the majority of sharks are currently endangered? There’s not enough of them to build anything with. If I so much as tried to stack a few to make a shopping trolley the WWF would come down on me harder than an elephant after a long day at the office. My dream was in tatters before it had even got off the ground.

The sharkitect must now only live on as a theoretical job. If someone wants a creche made out of sharks I could design them something funky on a computer, on a piece of paper maybe, and that is all. The chances of finding someone who is willing to pay for this nonsense is unlikely.

I didn’t want to kill sharks. I didn’t want to hurt them. I wanted to turn them from something thrilling and amazing into something beautiful, even more thrilling, even more amazing.

Jolly Good: more free gingerbread

If this is a new tradition I am all for it.

Last night I stopped off at the station on the way home for a sandwich. I get home late when I’m doing a day shift at work so a quick butty on the train is perfect.

Anyway, I selected my butty and went to the counter. The nice lady rang it up on the till, and then gestured to a stack of gingerbread men all piled up on the countertop. “Would you like one of these, free of charge?” she asked.

Why, yes I bloody would, thank you very much. I would love one of these free of charge.

I cannot help noticing that this gingerbread windfall comes almost three years to the day since my last free gingerbread incident. It cannot be a concidence. I am looking forward to my next free gingerbread man, which I expect to be offered in late March 2026. I’ll put a picture here when it happens.

Fame at last

My job sometimes involves me being awake in the middle of the night and doing strange things.

One strange thing I’ve had to do lately is find ways of making phone calls to Australia on behalf of some people at the other end of the country. Normally, you see, OJ Borg does the overnight show on the wireless, and he has a mobile phone in Australia that he rings every day at 2.15am. He then has a chat with whoever answers it, and he asks them to give it to another random Australian in time for the next show. Lately, though, his phone system has not been allowing him to call Australia, which is a real disadvantage for a feature of this kind.

Our involvement in this madness – making phone calls to Australia in the middle of the night – has escalated steadily over the last month until it reached a point where they wanted to explain what was going on to their audience. So I was asked if I would mind explaining.

I didn’t mind, though I was very tired and not sure I was making much sense. That is why this happened.

Then, half an hour later, it was time to make the call. I didn’t say a lot because it wasn’t connecting and I was busy pressing buttons and checking things because I was very worried I’d done something wrong, but I hadn’t, it was just that the mobile phone in Australia had no signal.

My agent will handle all requests for signed photos. Also, I am now taking bookings for the panto season.

Not Kev

A little while ago, in the comments thread of another post, Ian and I were musing about how we could get more material from Kev on the Beans, and Ian suggested we use AI to churn out some generic Kev-like material for a new “Not Kev” account.

Unfortunately there just isn’t enough genuine Kev blog material to feed in to an AI to teach it what it should be writing, so I suggested padding it out with a load of Jilly Cooper novels.

Anyway, long story short, I got ChatGPT to write us some “Not Kev” blog posts and, while they have turned out with a fairly heavy Jilly Cooper influence, they’re still basically decent enough to be posted under Kev’s name without anyone noticing the difference.

I’ve actually got three of these ready to go, but I think this is the best one.

Pouring
Beans

Month: March 2023