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.
Author: Chris5156
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!
Members of Beans Premium can choose from three membership reward tiers depending on their available disposable income.
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.
If that’s not enough, £19.99 a month will admit you to the Brand Name Baked Bean Tier. BNBBT members get all the benefits of Economy membership, plus they get to see exclusive members-only blog posts (one per year guaranteed). You’ll also get access to a form where you can send emails direct to Kev so you can send him repeated abusive messages asking when he’s going to put another podcast episode up.
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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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
A final March gift
More horse peril
I told you they were dangerous. Now they’re taking over picturesque human towns.

Take care out there. Nowhere is safe.
23kHz
On the recent Beans outing to Dublin, I briefly mentioned the frequency profile of FM transmission and the reasons we have alarms connected to certain frequencies. Since this raised a small eyebrow of interest I thought it would be a good idea, from both an educational and bean-scoring viewpoint, to expand further on this subject.
Settle in, this one’s going to be wild.
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.



