Bit of a fail

I had big plans, huge plans. These plans were colossal and they were monstrous.

If you tried to eat them then you’d either break your jaw trying to fit them in your mouth or you’d have to stop maybe halfway through because you couldn’t have anymore, you were stuffed to the max. They were gigantic.

My marvellous post will have to wait for another time. Until then, feast your eyes on this quiche that my brother served us the last time we were in Leeds. He kept bigging it up (no pun intended), saying how epic it was, how it dwarfed a regular sized quiche and…

Well, it is slightly larger than your average quiche and that’s about it. When you compare it to the Duplo brick though it looks humongous.

Four Word Reviews: The Christmas Album

It’s April, which means that rising sense of child-like excitement you feel is thanks to Christmas. Here in the Four Word Review lounge we like to crack out a Christmas album around this time of the year (see previous scrapes with Mahalia, Streisand, Bublé and Jewel); now, as the log crackles on the fire and the snow falls outside, it’s time to drop the needle on another. Unfortunately the only festive album I seem to have in store is this one: it’s “The Christmas Album” by the Tweenies.

Cover of The Christmas Album by the Tweenies

Obligations

I’m a man of my word and let nobody say otherwise (unless it’s me stating I’m going to get new tyres for my car because I keep saying it and I still haven’t done it yet). It’s this simple principle that I stick to in order for people to believe and trust me as their brother, boyfriend, friend or tree surgeon.

When I recently returned home to visit family, my brother surprised me with the admission that they had been round the charity shops and my nieces had bought some video games for me. A lovely gesture, or course, and one which didn’t initially fill me with a sense of dread. It was only when I remembered the quality of video games available in charity shops that my stomach turned upside-down and inside-out: previous years FIFA games, cricket and other lame sports titles, shovelware Nintendo Wii games where the quality is the same as my arse.

I was handed four Nintendo DS titles and, boy, am I a lucky person. Four excellent condition clangers for my collection. I am not a snob, dear reader, for as the keen chef can tell the good fruit from the bad fruit I can let you know mostly what a good game is and what isn’t. This stack was given to me to review by my brother and that is exactly what I am going to do. I certainly don’t want to play them and you certainly don’t want to read what I have to say, yet this is how it’s going down.

It was either that or trade them in for 40p.

Suggested new slogan

Ten years ago, when the New Beans was still new, we had a discussion about a marketing slogan for the website. Eventually we settled on Pouring Beans: The Thinking Man’s Casserole which adorns all of our advertising to this day.

Since then a whole decade has gone by, and I wonder if it’s time for a new slogan to appeal to the world of 2024. Until recently I wasn’t sure what I could ever suggest that would beat the current one, but a visit to a coffee shop bathroom in London last week gave me the answer.

One Team. One Pream. We.

Subscribe to Beans Premium

Here at Pouring Beans, we love to provide you with precisely eight fresh, innovative and exciting blog posts every month. But if you like what we do, you should consider signing up to our new subscriber-level service, Beans Premium.

Pledging a monthly subscription fee will help to cover the costs of running an international media operation on this scale and will make sure we can avoid doing proper jobs and instead concentrate on providing this ridiculous service to you. Plus we’ll make sure you get lots of exclusives, behind-the-scenes access, and the chance to buy merch from our members-only merch store!

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For just £9.99 a month, you can join the Economy Baked Bean Tier. Just for signing up we’ll send you a three-line email that says “thanks” in a fairly offhand way, and you’ll immediately gain access to the members-only merch zone where you can buy limited edition t-shirts with Chris’s face covering the entire front and/or back. They’re potentially worth thousands of pounds, if they ever become rare and sought-after, but you can get hold of them for just £89.99 plus tax, shipping and booking fees.

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The real Beans fans will settle for nothing less than the Upmarket Supermarket Premium Own Brand Bean Tier. A monthly subscription of just £99.99 a month will get you all the benefits enjoyed by the skinflint plebs on the lower tiers, plus you’ll get access to a 24/7 livestream of Chris’s doorbell camera, an annual electronic download of the previous year’s desktop calendar, and a one month free trial membership of the Britannia Music Club.

If you really care, and you really want to support the amazing work we do, then we recommend going all out on the Artisan Handmade Gourmet Baked Bean Experience Tier, which costs just £999.99 a month. You’ll enjoy all the benefits of the other tiers, which are for idiots, plus you can access Ian’s OnlyFans page where he chats with his fans and posts intimate pictures of obscure Japanese tat wrapped in cellophane. And just for signing up we’ll also send you an exclusive medallion on a ribbon, that you can wear like an actual winner, that says “Pouring Beans Superfan” on one side and “If I really cared I’d pay my monthly subscription and also send them some extra money as well” on the other.

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Late Night Beans with Tad Kensington

WHOOSH!

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another edition of Late Night Beans. Now I know what you’re all thinking, “what are you still doing here, Tad Kensington, when your Netflix special is still in the number one spot and you’ve got business talks planned through most of the UK for the rest of the year?” Firstly, that’s a long thought, and secondly, you need to get out more!

(Audience laughs)

I say it, but I don’t mean it!

(Audience laughs a little louder)

Nah, I love being here with all of you. I really look forward to getting up each day and getting out to where the heart of the people is; every evening right here in front of all of you, unlike where the heart of the people is around 4pm which is everyone counting down the last hour before going home, am I right?

(Cheers and laughter from the audience)

The news has been awful this week, just plain awful. I woke up on Tuesday morning and apparently there are far too many lampposts in the UK. Local authorities are making plans to tear down at least 30% of them in order to cutback on energy costs. This of course follows the recent court case where Jacob Brantford sued Brentford Council because he walked into a lamppost when stumbling home after a night on the lash and claimed it violated his civil rights. I don’t think we can say the future looks brighter with idiots like this in charge.

(A few loud, “yeahs!” and a ripple of applause from the audience)

We have a lot to get through today. This evening is well stacked like the start of a game of Jenga. We have lifestyle specialist and all round good egg Jemima Armspace to tell you where you might be going wrong with your diet and why eating figs may prove to be the key to success. Joseph Puccini is out promoting his latest blockbuster film, ‘Lazerblade 2: the reprisal’, which has already received rave reviews despite filming only starting last week. Margot Linchpin wants you to get involved with her social media awareness campaign about the dangers of chin biscuits and we have local band The Brainfillers to end the show with their new single ‘I want your kidneys’.

(Audience applauds)

I know, I know, I told you we had a lot to get through! I wasn’t lying! You love it though and I love bringing it here for you which is why this is the perfect relationship but buy me dinner first before we get too intimate.

(Audience laughs)

Right onto our first guest!

Bringing order to the chaos

What do you mean you don’t want more boring, mundane posts about things done in and around my flat? Cheeky scamp! Wind your neck in.

For a very long time, my cutlery drawer was like the wild West: unruly, brutal, unfeeling and packed full of horses. I threw everything back in when it was clean and dry, not caring where it went. You would need to rummage round to find what you were looking for and there was no guarantee you’d find it / that it was hiding in there. I even still had teaspoons Reuben had individually wrapped up for a laugh a few Christmases ago lurking about, the red, white and green paper mocking me from the back of the drawer. What a shambles.

These days I’m a new man. I’ve got a fresh ‘chude. The organiser serves as both a solution to and a continuation of the same problem; everything is neatly organised… IF it can fit in the cutlery holder. Some of the longer knives don’t and have to loosely spam about in a second drawer on the other side of the kitchen.

I also still have a lot of spoons.

1000

This is the thousandth post on the New Beans.

Here are some other things where I have racked up achievements in the thousands.

1000 days

I notched up my thousandth day on Sunday 1 February 1987. On the same day, Danielle Steele published her 21st novel, “Fine Things”, and the song I Knew You Were Waiting for Me by George Michael and Aretha Franklin was number 1 in the charts.

1000 weeks

My thousandth week began on Monday 7 July 2003, a day when I would almost certainly have been in a stuffy office on the top floor of the EC Stoner Building at the University of Leeds, filing away human resources files on staff pay adjustments. On my desk would have been a glass of squash, because I didn’t do hot drinks in those days, so I’d keep a bottle of squash in my desk drawer, and I had a red stripey glass to drink it from. Since I moved to university later that year the red stripey glass became my pen pot, and it still is now.

1000 geeky forum posts

I’ve been part of SABRE, the society for people who share my problem, for more than 23 years, and have made nearly 16,000 forum posts there.

My thousandth post was made on 17 August 2003. It says:

I fell today and may have sprained my right hand – suffice to say I’m typing this left handed, very slowly.

I’ll reply as soon as I can!

1000 comments

It took me two and a half years to clock up 1000 comments on the New Beans. My thousandth is this one from May 2016.

Is the Cromulet in north London? I don’t understand.
Chris5156, 13/05/2016 at 13:47