Extrance

A new year needs a new you with a sick haircut and a bad ‘chude. Unfortunately as all the barbers are shut at the moment you’ll have to make do with clipping away with a pair of scissors yourself and hoping for the best.

We can, however, help you with your ‘chude. I bet you’re so tired of all this “help each other” and “be nice to your neighbours and fellow humans”. What you want to do is put your fist in the middle of everyone’s faces and then laugh about it afterwards when you’re shoving Cadbury’s chocolate fingers up their exhaust pipes. Pipes.

The Extrance is a brand new thing for 2021. It’s an entrance that’s also an exit, so it’s totally confusing. How can one thing be another, you may ask yourself, that’s impossible. Well you’d be right but thankfully our boffins have managed to come up with the impossible and it’s available to pre-order right now.

Plus the ‘x’ makes it sounds modern and sexy.

It may look like a simple opening yet when you are within the presence of the Extrance the sheer power emanating from it will blow your socks clean away, right off your feet and into the streets, even if you’re wearing shoes. Find someone you dislike and make them walk through the Extrance. They will be immediately confused, unable to move because of the bewildering nature. Then, when they start to work out what’s happened, you press the button on your secret keyring and blast them from the hidden speakers in the Extrance’s frame with both barrels of Menendez-filtered Techno Jazz from our in-house band, X-Trance, right into their ear pipes. Pipes.

You’ll leave them dazed, deaf and possibly demented. The Three D’s as we have taken to calling it. Triple D to the max. The Extrance has so many possibilities from hilarious ruses at birthday parties to spamming the nincompoop at the office party. Your friends will whoop and cheer when they realise you’ve set them up with this year’s hottest item. They won’t want to miss out.

They come in a whole range of sizes and colours, from snooty green to snotty yellow and turdy brown, we’ve got the whole rainbow covered.

Pre-order now and receive a free ‘Entrance’ sign to go on your Extrance. The ‘n’ secretly peels off to reveal an ‘x’ underneath. Nobody will ever know, the fools.

From Kevindo Menendez – a name you can trust!

Splashing out

I don’t like Black Friday. I don’t like that it’s an American thing that makes no sense here, and I don’t like that it’s a ridiculous incentive to buy stupid crap I don’t need, and I don’t like that it causes stampedes of morons to trash shops in the hope of getting a bargain on a games console. I don’t like Black Friday.

So when Black Friday rolls around I take a principled stand and refuse to take part. My morals are stronger than my desire for bargains. Or so I thought.

This year I happened to be doing some Christmas shopping online when I hit on the Amazon list of Black Friday deals, and something turned my head.

I couldn’t resist. I was weak. I bought it.

I splashed out a totally unplanned £5, and now I have a pack of five adhesive cable clips in a range of sizes to keep all my wires tidy at the back of my desk.

Im not proud of it. But at least, when my standards slipped, it was for a just cause.

Four Word Reviews: The Colour of My Love

Ah! Celine Dion. Sometimes the random albums that arrive on my doorstep are a bit of a mystery, but we all know Celine Dion. One of the most popular artists the world has ever known, shifting more than 200 million albums worldwide, she isn’t just one of the biggest selling English acts of all time (although, yes, she is), but she achieved that having only learned to speak English around the age of 20, four or five years before The Colour of My Love was released, and continued releasing French-language albums in between her English releases. She also speaks and performs songs in Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

What we have here is her second English language album, released in 1993, and the source of several of her biggest hits, The Colour of My Love.

Badvert

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Toffifee. It’s a sort of over-packaged nutty caramel confection that a distant relative might buy a grandparent for Christmas, or that might be the only product you recognise if you visit a German supermarket.

In a move common to all European confectionary when it’s advertised in the UK, Toffifee released a new TV advert a couple of months ago that has somehow made it on to the airwaves without anyone involved realising that it looks at least 30 years out of date. Presumably nobody involved in the entire campaign had any sense of irony.

This post isn’t really about anything other than my need to share with you just how naff the whole thing is.

‘Snakes and Lads’

You know what’s wrong with board games these days? They’re not tough enough. Whilst they are entertaining and enjoyable, informative and fun, maddening and frustrating at times there is nothing about them that gives the impression of tough.

Courtesy of my toxic masculinity, I have come with a new take on an existing idea that will blow all you soft willows out of the water and into the gutters. It will remove your eyes and replace them with hot coals of pain.

‘Snakes and Lads’ follows the same basic formula as its predecessor, ‘Snakes and Ladders’; you have a board with one hundred squares and the object is to get from the bottom to the top first.

You play as Tony, a right hard lad who whilst out drinking with his mates decides that they should place a little wager on who can get to the kebab shop first. His best mate, Tony, who has been sh*t-faced since 7pm is of course well up for this. His cousin, Tony, never says no to a bet and the same goes for Tony, Tony and his dad, Tony (I should mention that you don’t necessarily need six players in total but it does help).

So, as one of the Tonys, you wander through the streets trying to get to the kebab shop. If you land on a snake, you strangle it like the piece of savage meat you are. This however does mean that the time you spend boshing that sod into the next week causes you to fall behind and you go back down to the corresponding square below. If you land on a lad, you go right in for a fight with that sucker. You roll the dice and if you get an even number, you smash ‘im down. If you happen to roll an odd number he gets in a cheeky punch and you stay where you are.

The first to reach ‘The Quilted Slosh’ gets to call all the other players whoopsies and collects a tenner from each of them.

Extra points for those who sit on a steak whilst playing and eat a whole bag of sugar all at the same time.

I have never been more convinced of my genius until this idea.

Podcast names

Years ago, when Kev and Ian started the podcast, they tried to come up with a name for it. That was, I think, what the whole first episode was about, though they only succeeded in naming the episode “Your Mum Loves a Sexy Pony”, and since then the podcast itself has always just gone by the decidedly provisional name “Episodes”.

I decided, therefore, to take it upon myself to fix this, and have consulted the internet for advice.

The website Business Name Generator has a helpful tool where you can type in some words to do with your podcast and it suggests great podcast names you could use. Here are some of the ideas it came up with.

Beans Millennium
Beans Battleborn (what?)
Beansgenix
Beans Pros Only
Beansque

That website is self-evidently awful, so I looked elsewhere. Another website, called CopyWritingCourse, has a different generator that asks what your podcast is about and then what your name is. I told it our name is Beans and the podcast is about Pouring. Here are some much better ideas.

Horsing Around with Beans
The Beans Taco
True Pouring Stories
Real Time With Beans
A Breath of Fresh Pouring
Generation Beans
The Pouring Dream
The Beans Perspective

That website is better, but still leaves something to be desired. Finally, in desperation, I turned to WorthStart, who have just posted a list of several hundred podcast name ideas. I scrolled past “Girl Podcast Names” and “Football Podcast Names” to see what they suggested for funny podcasts. Here’s the pick of their suggestions.

True Story Bro
Young Billionaire
Berry Blue Beauty
D’Artagnan
Defiant Princess
Deluxe Dream

All of this is a long way around to tell you that, having investigated all the available options, “Episodes” appears to be the least terrible name for our podcast. So, unless you particularly like the name “Deluxe Dream”, that’s settled. Thank you.

The Pouring Beans intellectual property portfolio

It occurred to me the other day, when Kev trademarked the name “Metal Horse™”, that we’ve trademarked quite a few terms over the years, and the terms that make up our intellectual property must now be quite substantial.

I have, therefore, conducted several exhausting days* of research to discover just how wide-ranging our various trademarks are, and I can present the results to you now for the first time. So here are all of the Pouring Beans trademarked terms, every last one, in chronological order.

Episode 20: The Face of…

In this, the final episode of Series 2, we talk about the things we’d be the face of. In the process we discuss:

Cushions
Crossing the Road
Glitter
Cigars