Avatar Four Word Reviews: Strike

It’s that time again. Time to slide another unwanted CD into the player and see what fate has in store. This time around we are meeting The Baseballs, who are presenting us with their debut album “Strike!” from 2009. I hadn’t heard of this album, or this band, before, but a look at it and a bit of cursory research suggested this Four Word Review wouldn’t be too bad. Some are painful, of course, and others are just a bit of fun. I was dismayed to find, however, that this was a genuinely unpleasant experience, and in this review I’ll be attempting to work out why.

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Avatar Seeds

Kate has been very much getting into gardening lately, and in particular, growing vegetables. Our back garden is on its way to becoming a vegetable garden. Last year we had home grown tomatoes, potatoes, rocket and carrots, and this year we’re being even more adventurous.

Since all this stuff is being grown from seeds, I am enjoying discovering that mundane vegetables have impossibly exciting names for their varieties.

Some tell you where it’s from, like our spring onions, which are White Lisbon, or the Brussels sprouts which are Evesham Special. Others tell you what the cultivator was hoping for, like Elegance salad leaves or Sparkler radishes or our yellow courgettes, which are called Gold Rush. I see what you did there.

We’ve got some flowers with descriptive names too; our sunflowers have been set up for greatness with the name Titan while the dahlias are Showpiece. We have high hopes for them both.

I don’t know what to expect from our aubergines now I know they are called Jewel Jet F1. But I am a big fan of the classical names. Our spinach is Apollo, and we have two varieties of parsnips, one called Palace and the other called Gladiator. I have checked the packet and Gladiator parsnips are a “vigorous hybrid” with “large, canker-resistant roots”. Just like real gladiators were.

Thrilled and exhilerated by all these names, I then turn to the packet of beetroot seeds, and see that they are Mixed. It had to end somewhere.

Avatar Mysterious debris

A few years ago I moved to a new location and reported to you on the mysterious lumps in a park not far from where I lived. Well, I now live fairly close to France, where the mysterious objects in local parks are of a different nature.

Until about 2015, if you happened to join the army and they decided you looked like the right sort of person to drive a tank, they would take you to a place called Hogmoor which was some woods with lots of muddy tracks and water traps to drive tanks around. Presumably you then did a tank driving test or something to prove you’d learned all their was to know about piloting big metal boxes around Hampshire woodland.

Anyway, after that the army decided they didn’t want to be involved in this part of Hampshire any more, so they went away, leaving behind large areas of a town that are being redeveloped into housing estates. They also left behind Hogmoor, which has been turned into the town’s equivalent of a park – except it doesn’t have big grassy lawns and flowerbeds, it’s just a big woodland with park-type things in it like an adventure playground and a cafe and stuff. I’m very happy with that because walking around in the woods is far nicer than walking around a manicured park.

The other thing Hogmoor has are all the bits of rusty debris the army didn’t take away when they left. I now walk the dog around here more or less every day, so I thought I’d share with you some of the mysterious military debris I keep finding lying around the place.

Avatar Loyalty update

Many, many years ago I wrote a post here on the Beans about my porridge loyalty card. I seem to remember it was not deemed as impressive as I had hoped and nobody else really seemed very invested in the level of loyalty I was showing to a simple breakfast food.

Anyway, a lot of time has passed since then, so I thought it would be a good time to look through my wallet and take stock of all the loyalty cards I now possess. By doing so we will learn something about where my allegiences lie in 2024.

I found seven loyalty cards. Here they all are.

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Avatar A slice of 2011

A couple of months ago we took a trip to the ancient world of 2010, when Ian and I were hard at work recording our second album, Masterpiece. Now we’re firing up our time machine again to pay a visit to November 2011, and a series of photos taken during the recording sessions for our third album Pop Squared.

There are three acts to this extremely dramatic album. The first pictures are taken in my old flat in Crystal Palace, as we recorded our brilliant and ground-breaking music. There’s only a few of those. Then we quickly get into a second group, which are pictures we took of ourselves while the other one was getting ready in the bathroom. I think the idea was to get potential album pictures while saving precious time, so I would capture the essence of my music while Ian was brushing his teeth, then we’d swap over so Ian could attempt to photograph the ineffable nature of his muse while I was having a wee. Then after that we went out to Keston Common, where it was very cold and misty, to take some moody outdoor shots, some of which turned up on the album cover.

We took eighty-odd pictures, but nobody needs that, so I’ve slimmed them down to about 50 and stuck them in a new picture album.

I urge you – in fact, I implore you – to take a look at them for yourself, but if you want a taster, there are moments of great joy to be found in there, like these highlights.

Ian really loved his dinosaur hoodie. This was the album of “Dinosaur Gal”, of course, so it was completely appropriate that Ian appears in a dinosaur-themed garment.

We really wanted a picture where I was on the phone and Ian was a dinosaur. We took lots of them. Most of the ones I deleted were like this.

2011 was a long time ago. A long time ago. And we both look so unbelievably young. Look at that hair. Look at that wrinkle-free face. Look at those terrible, terrible shoes. Unbelievable.

Anyway, that’s as much 2011 as we have time for. If I can find any photos from the time we recorded The Eponymous Album, you will be the first to know.

Avatar A Brave Old Beans

This scarcely seems believable, but it’s true: the first post on this incarnation of the Beans was made ten years ago today when Kev published A Brave New Beans. I still think of this as the “new” Pouring Beans, but it’s been running nearly twice as long as the original. This blog, and all it contains, now forms a record of the whole of our thirties.

Anyway, I wanted to make a post marking this slightly unbelievable milestone, so I have taken my inspiration from Kev’s original post. His “A Brave New Beans” was just a test to make sure everything was set up, and it just contains the word “words” repeated 127 times (I counted). So let’s see how many words we have produced in ten years.

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