Jeans

You know what’s mad? The world of jeans, specifically women’s jeans. Sure, you could easily say the world of cheese (“let’s roll huge wheels of it down a steep hill and let people chase after them,”) or the world of imaginary policemen made of earwax are equally bizarre, and you’d be completely right. The difference though is that I can take law enforcers made of cerumen (it’s a medical term, I looked it up), what I can’t take is wandering into a supermarket and seeing rum and pineapple mixed in with my cheddar. MY cheddar. No. Stop that. None of that.

The world of jeans was so straightforward for me until a recent trip to Marks and Spencer looking for Christmas things brought forward this oddity:

“Mom ankle grazer; what the deuce is that?”

It was then casually explained to me by Vikki that women’s jeans all have these wild and crazy names. How sheltered I must have been to have not realised this sooner. Not that I go wandering around the women’s section in clothes shops (despite what the British press continue to write about me, all of them made up and, no comment, you can get one from my solicitor). I then immediately looked up more details on the M & S website.

Blimey. Was this always the case? Are men’s jeans the same? Not in the slightest. What we have is very basic: loose fit, straight fit, straight let, slim fit, blue, black, grey, tapered. Nothing remotely interesting. It’s nice that everything is so much more playful in the world of women’s jeans. Perhaps it wasn’t always the case and fifty years ago slightly muddled women formed queues around the building for dull, lifeless articles of clothing with names like ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘stocky’ and ‘no’. That said, I wouldn’t fancy wandering into a shop and asking if they have anything in Magic Shaping High Waisted Flare or a Harper Supersoft Cigarette Jeans. Throw in a few more vowels and you may as well be reading Harry Potter spells.

This means that men’s jeans need a radical overhaul and given my vast, rich experience dealing with many different lines of work, I believe I am the right person for the job. This is what I’ve been working on:

Stretch fit changed to Elephant Limo Garrison
Slim fit changed to Furious Corner Pop-up Shop
Straight fit changed to Nothing Flouncy Sunshine
Straight leg changed to Recess Chimney Warrant
Loose fit changed to Barnacle Profit Tax
Tapered changed to Wounded Poison Ranch Dressing

All it took was a little time and a little thought and now everything is so much better. You’ll thank me next time you’re walking around Asda and notice that they have a pair of Furious Corner Pop-up Shop in your size. Yes, you will.

Why would you buy this?

We all know that I have a turbulent past (turbulent, I say!) with spending my disposable income. Kev has gotten so mad in the past based on my “pointless purchases” that he literally cannot even sometimes. It’s all heartbreaking stuff.

As we wandered around the slightly freezing Lake District in mid-November, me forgetting a proper coat and taking a photo where my nose looks as bright and pink as a carnation, I came across the following in a shop. It was hidden away towards the back along with some other shonky and partially damaged goods:

Now I’m one for a bargain but unless I have another set of draughts with only the black pieces, possibly acquired from a rival store with a similar problem, then surely this is going to remain unsold for some time.

Did they eat all the black pieces thinking they were licorice? Were they stolen by a deranged kleptomaniac with specific requirements? Did anyone get a video?

We will never know the full story and normally I would put good money on them still being there the next time we visit, however human beings are weird and I reckon someone will snap them up sharpish. Possibly as a joke present.

Ack, that should have been me!

The Shoe and the Bin

Welcome to the Shoe and the Bin, Carnforth’s leading example of prime pub bistro patisserie and winner of four ‘Confusing pub but great grub’ awards since 2015.

We pride ourselves on the concoction of food available from our three leading chefs participating in everything from Chinese to Thai to Brazilian and traditional English fare. If you’re after something in particular we can guarantee that we will have cooked it at least once in our 35 years of trading.

With the Christmas period approaching, it would be best to book a table now, even if you don’t need it. We get fully booked within a few hours of December and we would hate for you to miss out on all the fun. Chef Boswick is cooking up a storm with his mango and hazelnut chutney stuffing balls and chef Annalise can’t wait for you to try her steaming mincemeat gravy cake trays.

This is but a small sample menu of the delights that you can expect to see over the festive period, subject to availability and whether or not we can be bothered to dust off the extra kitchen equipment required to make it.

December Menu

Starters

Home cured tin roof salmon, horseradish cauliflower umbrellas, picked Gorbachev, snout oil (GF)
Mixed balcony terrine, feta mousse sharks, disgusting leek with a fresh jus (V, GF?)
Smoked bollok baraccas, sauce uncommon gribble, apple underarm spin, sourdough shat (DF)
Cajun pork snubbles, caramelised orange dandruff, picked mooli, fractured booli (GF, possibly DF)
Singing mackerel herblets, bromance potato salad, “laughing” croutons, citrus gel, Tale of Two Cities
Seasonal salad, seasonal purée, seasonable backwash, seasonal roasted barley with a seasonal fresh jus (VG, yes, very good)

Mains

Acrid cod, saffron undercarriage, stained broccoli, split butter opera fund (GF…)
Hasty beef feather blade, caramelised fondant jacket, mash ‘n’ a half, wander carrot, criminal leek, red wine jus (GF?)
Ravished sea bream, blimey purée, dilapidated Jersey royals, curious tenderstem with nutty forecast fennel slaw
Tempura eagle tofu, distinct absence of potato, pak choi, pineapple choi, Chris Choi, waffle and spring onion salsa
“Bing Bling” chicken breast, telephone purée, hot potato mingers, creamed dialect, with a fresh jus (GF!)
Paranoid risotto, herb space, toucan cheese (V)

Desserts

Unruly salted caramel chocolate and leisure centre tart, mango flange
Brigadier red wine poached pear, flaked docile crumb, arresting cream, taxi home (GF)
Angry lemon posset, chuckle crumbles, raspberry mullet
Mincemeat gravy cake tray, meringue parapets, upskill crust, shot of Pepto-Bismol
Chocolate mousse, tear-stained cinnamon dome, passionfruit bookmark with a banana bichon frise sauce
Vanilla crème brûlée, black olive amaretto, with a daunting fresh jus (GF)

The Shoe and the Bin: come for the food, stay for the food.

Newsboost – Secure socks

A man has been caught buying socks for himself at an Asda in Leyton Mills last night.

The shopper, Denzel Ruckus, was apprehended by security as he made his purchase and tried to leave the premises around 6pm on Monday night. Witnesses confirm that in addition to the socks, Mr Ruckus also bought a tin of beans, a pack of six eggs and a gammon steak. Sounds like a pretty tasty evening.

“I don’t understand what the problem is,” confirmed the slightly bewildered shopper, clutching his socks tightly and a bag with the rest of his shopping, “I paid for them with my card and the payment went through so why am I being detained? I have the receipt right here. All or my pairs of socks have holes in them around the heel, so I needed replacements. I only live around the corner. Did I do something wrong?”

Shoppers were immediately alerted to the unlikely phenomenon. A family of six asked for Mr Ruckus’ autograph on the way to the car with their own weekly shop.

A spokesperson from Asda said, “this is unprecedented, a man buying his own socks? Not waiting for someone to put a pair in his stocking for Christmas? Barmy. We’ve already had a photo of Mr Ruckus blown up onto a canvas and hung in the employee area. He’s going to be a local hero.”

It is estimated that roughly 21,239 million pairs of socks are created each year and 89% of these are bought for men / boys during the Christmas period. Records show that a man hadn’t bought himself some socks since 1998 and even then it was done accidentally by John Boone of Weston-super-Mare who hasn’t been seen since.

The township-level district of Datang in the city of Zhuji in Zhejiang Province, People’s Republic of China, has become known as ‘Sock City’. The town currently produces 8 billion pairs of socks each year, a third of the world’s sock production.

If you’re interested in more sock-based facts then join our sock fandom page at www.newsboost.com/sockfacto

WFH

My job isn’t one you can do from home, so while the rest of the world has spent the last few years abandoning the office, I’ve still been turning up in person like some sort of mug.

The other day I had the opportunity to spend a day working from home, and grabbed it with both hands. I had lots of project work to do and none of it required me to be in the building: I had some training videos that needed voiceovers recording, I had documentation to write and I had some development work to do on some internal web tools I wrote. So on Friday I fired up a work laptop at home and got stuck in.

Not only did I get more sleep and avoid the time and cost of about 3½ hours of commuting, I also got loads done. Here is a summary of how I spent my ten hour shift.

Activity	Duration
Attend morning meeting for WFH staff through my phone because the laptop wasn’t logged in yet	0h 30m
Struggle to get the work laptop to connect to my home wifi and talk to IT support about proxy settings	0h 45m
Check emails	0h 10m
Make coffee, get distracted by arrival of post	0h 10m
Open training slides in Powerpoint, set up USB microphone and headphones, test setup, get distracted and read news articles on the Guardian website	1h
Do Guardian Quick Crossword #16972	0h 15m
Start recording voiceover, discover time limit on Powerpoint recordings, search for alternative screen recording software, install on work laptop	0h 25m
Dog arrives in room, play with dog	0h 30m
See message on phone, reply to message, see notification on Reddit, scroll through Reddit	0h 20m
Break for lunch	1h
Unlock laptop, set Teams status to “available”; toilet break	0h 10m
Start recording voiceover with new software, get lost on complex slide animation twenty minutes in, discover there is no edit feature, resign self to having to start recording again, become despondent about project, make tea, look at phone again for a bit	1h 30m
Let dog out for a wee, throw ball for dog which gets dog excited, dog spends extended period of time on very wet lawn, dog runs back inside and through house with muddy paws. Clean dog’s paws. Clean kitchen, dining room and hallway floors with Dettol wipes	0h 45m
See email from team leader asking how day is going, redraft reply eight times, eventually just say it’s going well thanks	0h 15m
Notice office-hours staff will be leaving work in 15 minutes, write email asking complex question about SQL database backups for web app that I need to work on, send email slightly too late for it to be seen or dealt with before Monday	0h 30m
Rehearse complex slide animation that tripped me up before, change animation after rehearsal, fail to rehearse new animation sequence	0h 30m
Make tea, get distracted by dog, play with dog	0h 30m
Start recording voiceover, get lost on changed animation sequence twenty minutes in, plough on anyway since interest in project is now waning, continue to end of recording	0h 40m
Discover freeware screen recording software has recorded in some random format to some place in the cloud, attempt to download and convert this to something useful	0h 20m
Send email to team leaders shared inbox about something unrelated to today’s work to prove I am still online at the end of my shift	0h 5m
Log off	0h 5m

It’s got CBA written all over it

There are times when we all have good intentions, when we’ve set out to do the best or the right thing only to fall at the first hurdle. “Yes, I intended to sit down and set up that subscription to support the homeless cats in Greece but there’s a repeat of ‘Changing Rooms’ on that I cannot miss.” Things like that.

Laziness is apparent in human beings more than all the positive traits we got going. It’s all too easy to wave off your obligations with a swift, “I can’t be bothered” because it’s Friday night or it’s Sunday morning or it’s three weeks to Kwanzaa and I still haven’t figured out what I’m wearing. We’ve all got excuses in spades.

Recently I was browsing the World of Books website to see what games they had in stock. It seems as though madness has taken over because their prices are even more laughable than the stuff on Ebay. I’m not sure who’s been doing their pricing but they need to calm the chuff down. What did make me do a double take though is contained in the image below:

Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know what bloody game this is. It looks to be Chinese or Japanese, beyond that I’m lost. Clearly the person doing the listing had the same problems because rather than translating the title or looking it up on Google, they chose to set it as the wonderfully-named ‘????????? 2’.

Beautiful. Don’t change a thing.

This is a phoned-in job if ever I saw one. I only hope they get the first ‘?????????’ game donated in too so they can be sold together as a set.

Subscribe to Beans Premium

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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!