InterludeThis month hasn’t been a great month for posting stuff, but luckily I had some stuff in mind so I’m just spamming the Beans with it tonight. The next one is some genuinely good content, but before we get to that, here’s something from a musical project we’ve all been trying to forget.
I still have hours and hours of this that we never even watched, let alone turned into something. Maybe this year I’ll do something with it all.
Your comfortable lifeThe other week we put our bin out as usual. The black bin, which is recycling, and not the green bin, which is landfill. I would like to meet the person who chose that colour scheme and ask them why they have to take their problems out on the rest of us.
Anyway, we put it out, and when the binpeople had done their thing, we brought it back in. Except now it had a lid that didn’t work properly – it was attached only at one side and flapped around in an unhelpful manner when you tried to open it.
Luckily there’s an easy fix. Amazon will sell you new hinge pins for wheely bins, and for reasons I don’t fully understand it will sell you a pack of eight. Who needs to repair that many wheely bin hinges all at once?
When the new plastic things arrived I opened the pack and fitted one, which resolved the bin problem. I then noticed the label on the packet.
“QOPAHI”, it said, this being the sort of mindless collection of letters that makes up every brand name on Amazon these days. “Enjoy your comfortable life”.
Thanks, Qopahi. I will.
Beans flashback: Chris gives bloodCan you believe that one of the defining moments of my life, and probably of yours too, was ten years ago today? The New Beans didn’t exist back then, so I didn’t record this for posterity as a blog post. The ten year anniversary seems like a good time to put that right.
The last moment of MarchThis is what you get for posting in the last hours of the month.
Oh, sure, we’ve all done it. You think you’ve got a few more days to make another post, and then wham! It’s the 31st already and the minutes are running out. It’s like Geoffrey Chaucer himself put it: the Bean Counter waits for no man.
Anyway, I felt like I was on safe ground. The one year anniversary of the last podcast post had been and gone, and up my sleeve I had a nice little routine to post. It was going to be a transcript of a “missing” podcast episode. Stage directions indicating scuffling noises and someone eating something crinkly, a false start to asking a question, someone mishearing something. The subject would be along the lines of “what’s the longest you’ve had to wait for the next episode of something?”.
Anyway, I hadn’t written it yet, but in preparation I listened to Gravestones on my way home from work. That would be about two hours ago. In the intervening two hours, Kev has only gone and put another podcast up, hasn’t he? Unbelievable.
So the wind has been comprehensively extracted from my sails. Never mind. There’s four minutes of March left, so I will change course quite abruptly. It’s been a fairly middling day at the end of a fairly rough week, and this made me laugh. Let’s all watch this. Here’s to better times, and silliness, and listening to a new podcast episode on the way to work tomorrow. Thanks Kev. Even if it threw a spanner right in my stupid works.
Jolly Good: more free gingerbreadIf this is a new tradition I am all for it.
Last night I stopped off at the station on the way home for a sandwich. I get home late when I’m doing a day shift at work so a quick butty on the train is perfect.
Anyway, I selected my butty and went to the counter. The nice lady rang it up on the till, and then gestured to a stack of gingerbread men all piled up on the countertop. “Would you like one of these, free of charge?” she asked.
Why, yes I bloody would, thank you very much. I would love one of these free of charge.
I cannot help noticing that this gingerbread windfall comes almost three years to the day since my last free gingerbread incident. It cannot be a concidence. I am looking forward to my next free gingerbread man, which I expect to be offered in late March 2026. I’ll put a picture here when it happens.
Fame at lastMy job sometimes involves me being awake in the middle of the night and doing strange things.
One strange thing I’ve had to do lately is find ways of making phone calls to Australia on behalf of some people at the other end of the country. Normally, you see, OJ Borg does the overnight show on the wireless, and he has a mobile phone in Australia that he rings every day at 2.15am. He then has a chat with whoever answers it, and he asks them to give it to another random Australian in time for the next show. Lately, though, his phone system has not been allowing him to call Australia, which is a real disadvantage for a feature of this kind.
Our involvement in this madness – making phone calls to Australia in the middle of the night – has escalated steadily over the last month until it reached a point where they wanted to explain what was going on to their audience. So I was asked if I would mind explaining.
I didn’t mind, though I was very tired and not sure I was making much sense. That is why this happened.
Then, half an hour later, it was time to make the call. I didn’t say a lot because it wasn’t connecting and I was busy pressing buttons and checking things because I was very worried I’d done something wrong, but I hadn’t, it was just that the mobile phone in Australia had no signal.
My agent will handle all requests for signed photos. Also, I am now taking bookings for the panto season.
Not KevA little while ago, in the comments thread of another post, Ian and I were musing about how we could get more material from Kev on the Beans, and Ian suggested we use AI to churn out some generic Kev-like material for a new “Not Kev” account.
Unfortunately there just isn’t enough genuine Kev blog material to feed in to an AI to teach it what it should be writing, so I suggested padding it out with a load of Jilly Cooper novels.
Anyway, long story short, I got ChatGPT to write us some “Not Kev” blog posts and, while they have turned out with a fairly heavy Jilly Cooper influence, they’re still basically decent enough to be posted under Kev’s name without anyone noticing the difference.
I’ve actually got three of these ready to go, but I think this is the best one.
Four Word Reviews: Funky DoryYou know how, occasionally, something you’ve never experienced before is somehow just what you expected? That is how I felt when Rachel Stevens’ debut solo album, Funky Dory, went into my CD player. I more or less remembered the lead single, Sweet Dreams My LA Ex, but apart from that the main thing I knew is that it was a solo album from the best one out of S Club 7. Rachel Stevens evidently wanted to sound a bit more grown up now that she had thrown off the shackles of the other S Club 6, and it was 2003. Put those things together and you’ve got exactly what this sounds like.
