Category: Not very good

Avatar What is a Mandolin?

A wise person once asked, “Where is my mind?” I often find myself coming back to this question as a reference point during the day because I know where my mind is physically, however there are times when certain acts of stupidity make me question whether it is really there at all.

You must remember to question everything. Nothing is for certain anymore. If you’d have told me fifteen years ago that I would have a tiny device in my pocket that could download cute videos of cats walking around like human beings at any time during the day I would have laughed right in your face. YOUR. FACE.

Do you know what a mandolin is? If you think it’s a stringed instrument in the lute family then you’d be so wrong I would have to stand on a precipice and tell the world. This is actually what a mandolin is:

It is a small, thin chocolate bar from across the sea, from a world where other chocolate bars clearly don’t exist. Quite what music shops have been selling all these years is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they have all been misspelling it all these years and those instruments of 6, 8 and 12 strings are, in fact, mendolins or mandolines, or possibly something else. If the decision were up to me, I believe a mandoloin would be an excellent name.

Faced with the possibility that all those times I have been getting mandolins all wrong, I have therefore proposed two outcomes to this predicament:

  1. I will write, perform and record a song using the aforementioned chocolate mandolin;
  2. I will eat one of these other “mandolins” you find in music stores.

It is the only way to find balance and harmony between these two vastly different things with the same name. If I am only half successful then the whole thing will be a total loss. If I can achieve both then the sun will come out and there will be a tomorrow to look forward to.

Wish me luck.

Avatar Not Very Good – Pets

Shhhhh! Be very quiet. No, I’m not hunting rabbits, but if you’re not careful then you may disturb this very rare animal I happened upon not so long ago:

Snuggled away in its carry case, away from prying eyes, the small collection of empty beer cans can be startled by even the tiniest of noises. You must approach with caution and with your hands behind your back as any attempt to circumvent these instructions will see them running away into the distance.

That is if this was a real thing. If the owner of this carry case is convinced that this is an animal of some kind then they are doing pets all wrong. A set of empty beer cans will not come when you call them. You cannot put them on a lead and walk them round the streets. There is nothing to boast about and no amount of grooming will turn them into a pet worthy of a competition winner.

You can pet them and you can instill a certain amount of love, however in order to get the best of them you must open up their heads and drink the insides. If you tried this with a goldfish or a hamster you would have the RSPCA breathing down your neck faster than you can say, ” official court summons” or possibly “Jimmy Tarbuck”.

This kind of relationship will only end in confusion, heartache and a trip to your corner shop to replenish your fridge with more “pets”. If I were you, and quite frankly I am relieved I am not, I would settle for a potato with a face drawn on it: strong, loyal and great with steak.

Next time… Animals!

Avatar Not Very Good – Food

Now then, let us all consider for a moment the best place to leave your chorizo.

Should you leave it in the fridge to preserve the flavours? Should you leave in the cupboard, in a cool, dry place? Or, and I know this seems a bit unorthodox for some people, how about outside your house, near the kerb?

As a human being, or the closest equivalent that likes stretchy trousers, I do enjoy my food. I want it tasty and I want it now. I also want it to be free from disease, infection and cat’s piss. I can imagine that the artisan who decided to leave the chorizo outside may not have realised this at the time. Yes, you may create a unique combination of flavours but if this is at the expense of the health of the people eating the food then you may want to reconsider.

We could look at this from another angle. Perhaps this isn’t edible chorizo. Perhaps this is a tiny chorizo car and the owner has parked it carefully on the side of the road. If that’s correct then the person is doing cars right and it has nothing to do with food.

I am of the opinion that it is food and it is wrong otherwise this article wouldn’t make any sense (?) I do not want your road meat. I do not want to indulge in your pretentious kerb-surfing, asphalt-touching tubes of protein. Please keep your bizarre attempts at food presentation in your houses where you can eat off the floor as much as you like.

I’m off for a burger.

Next time… Animals!

Avatar I’m better at someone else’s job than they are

I don’t say things like that lightly. I don’t walk around, smugly declaring myself better at other people’s jobs. Most of the time I trust that if someone has a job they got it because they can do it.

But I make an exception for the people who write adverts for the tube. Most adverts on the tube are in the form of a jokey tube map. In the winter, every other advert is for cold medicine or cough syrup or something similar, and every single one for years and years has been in the form of a tube map-style line diagram with stops labelled “sniffly nose”, “tickly cough” and “aches and pains”. There’s no imagination. If you’re advertising on the tube apparently the only advert any advertising executive can come up with is a tube map.

All these adverts are crap, but I have now definitively found the worst one. It’s for one of those new companies whose whole existence is to make one kind of mattress that they claim is the best mattress in the world and which they only sell online. I don’t know how this is suddenly such an exciting business model but there’s a lot of them doing it. Anyway, here’s their crap, predictable tube advert.

Oh, look! It’s a fake tube line diagram. This one has tube station names on it, altered to make puns on words to do with sleep. I can live with that – in the same way I live with all the other crap adverts like this one, living with it while silently hating and resenting everything about it. What I can’t live with is how bad the puns are.

“Snoredon” is the worst. That’s the one that got me worked up. I’ve lived in London for 11 years, lived in all parts of it, done the Tube Challenge where you go to every station in a single day, and it still took me several minutes to figure out what that was a reference to.

Eventually I got it when I said it out loud. Morden, the southern terminus of the Northern Line. Morden, which ends “en”, not “on”. Morden, which is at the furthest extremity of the one line that goes a significant distance into South London, used in an advert on a transport network that exists almost entirely in North London and will be seen almost exclusively by people who will not be familiar with Morden at all. If you want a pun on “snore” using a tube station name, go for “Moorgate”. A tube station in Central London on four different lines that far more people will have heard of. A tube station with a distinctive ending that makes it easier to guess what the pun’s about. “Snoregate”. There you go, Casper. I did a better job than your advertising copywriters and I did it in about a minute.

I don’t mind that I can come up with a better crap joke than they can. What irritates me is that someone pitched that advert idea – the one that’s been used a thousand times before and which can be seen in multiple adverts for all sorts of products in every tube carriage already – they pitched it like it was their own brilliant original idea, and they got told it was a good idea, and they got paid for it. And then someone sat down and came up with four of the most half-baked, half-arsed puns on tube station names – so bad that at least one of them is obscure to the point of not working at all when a moment’s thought is all it takes to find a better one – and they put their pen down because they thought they were good enough. And then someone else agreed, and they paid money for it. People got paid for being this bad at their job.

That’s why it bothers me. Because I know I could do bedder. I just need snore of a chance.

Avatar Four Word Reviews: Doing it My Way

It’s been a long time since we last dipped our toes into the chilly water of Four Word Reviews – seven months, in fact. That’s largely because the mysterious supply of terrible CDs has been slowing down lately. Still, there’s one here now, and that is an album that’s ten years old this month: Doing it My Way by the 2006 X Factor runner-up Ray Quinn.

There’s not much to say about this album – as we will see – for the simple reason that it’s an album of swing cover versions. It contains exactly the songs you would expect and they’ve all been recorded and performed in exactly the same way as all the hundreds of other albums like this that have been churned out over the years. Everyone from Robbie Williams to Jason Manford has had a pop at it, and they all basically sound like this.

In this specific case, Ray Quinn was all of 19 years old when he came second (second!) in the X Factor, and he was whisked away to Los Angeles to record this album at Capitol Records Tower, in the very studio where Frank Sinatra belted out some of these songs in a more genuine way many years before. I read that on Wikipedia and it might be the single most depressing thing about the whole album. Wait, no, this is: it was a gold-selling album in 2007 and Ray Quinn became the first artist to score a number 1 album without ever releasing a single.

Track Title Word 1 Word 2 Word 3 Word 4
1 Ain’t That a Kick in the Head Literally no opinions here
2 Fly Me to the Moon Weirdly flutey and arhythmic
3 My Way Limper than Frank’s Way
4 That’s Life Violently offensive Hammond organ
5 Mack the Knife Robbie sang it better
6 Smile Tuned this one out
7 The Way You Look Tonight Urgh. Creepy crooning crescendo
8 Summer Wind Generic swing sung generically
9 What a Wonderful World Is this even “swing”?
10 Mr. Bojangles OK song made tedious
11 New York, New York No York No York

It’s quite hard to have an opinion about this album because it’s all songs you’ve heard a hundred times before sung in exactly the way you’ve heard them sung a hundred times before. It offers nothing new. You have to listen pretty hard to work out it’s this generic singing guy and not one of the thousands of other blokes with halfway decent voices who have chosen to tread this heavily congested road. It lacks any sincerity. A 19 year old can’t really sing “My Way” and hope to make you think they mean it, not that this particular 19 year old sounds much like he’s trying. Some of the more upbeat and jazzy numbers have been made quieter and less jazzy for some reason. It’s a big, brass-heavy sigh of a record.

In summary, my favourite thing about this album was that I could sometimes forget it was this X Factor guy singing it and let it wash over me like it was literally any other album of identical-sounding swing covers. My least favourite thing was “New York, New York” being turned into a sort of stodgy, plodding recital. Even I give that song more welly if I sing along to it.

Avatar Not Very Good – Shopping

What constitutes as not being very good? Who gets to decide these things and why should we listen? In this new series, the Beans goes undercover to try to answer some of these questions. Take for example this photo here:

Whoever this person was, they clearly were not very good. In this instance they were not very good at shopping. All they were going to buy was a bottle of Diet Coke and some mineral water. They have completely missed the sweet, biscuit and crisp aisles, and thus eliminated the opportunity to binge on Haribo and Jaffa cakes at home without anyone pointing and shouting out rude names. They were planning on only buying beverages. There’s not even some bacon and eggs for the following morning.

It’s very frustrating to come across this. I expect that this shopper realised how not very good they were mid-shop and fled Tesco in embarrassment. Here’s hoping the CCTV pictured up their rosy red cheeks as they sprinted towards the exit, blushing and squirming in equal measures.

The Not Very Good do have the advantage of being able to take hold of their lives and try to be less Not Very Good in the future. I bless all the holy pigs of Portugal that this person did a lot better the next time they went shopping.

Next time… Animals!