Bank holidays

There’s a serious problem that we have all been completely failing to address, and it’s been going on for too long now. I have decided to fix it. The arrangement of bank holidays across the year is inconsistent, unfair and stupid.

Just look at this chart showing where all the bank holidays fell in 2020. What a mess.

Just spacing them out evenly wouldn’t bring an end to this madness, because there’s only seven of them. That would mean a wait of 52 days between free days off work, a barely acceptable waiting time.

The solution is obvious. More bank holidays, sprinkled evenly throughout the year, so we get one about every two weeks. That’s a massive win. Here’s my suggested list.

New Year’s Day
Blue Monday
Pancake Day
Box Set Thursday
Spring Cleaning Day
St Patrick’s Heavy Drinking Day
Good Friday
Easter Monday
First T-Shirt Day of the Year
Eurovision Day
The Other May Bank Holiday
Boxing Day (relocated)
Wimbledon Finals Day
Beer Garden Friday
Barbecue Day
Holiday Packing Day
Summer Bank Holiday
DFS Sale Day
Steak Pie and Mash Day
Winter Coat Day
Wellies and Leaf Crunching Day
Bonfire Night
Pyjama Wednesday
Christmas Shopping Day
Christmas Day
New Year’s Eve

This results in a much better spread of bank holidays through the year, as shown below.

Please consider this the start of my campaign to enshrine these new bank holidays in law, and also the start of my campaign to be Prime Minister. Thank you.

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.

Down

There’s a button labelled “down”, but it’s not a lift. In fact the button appears to be attached to some sort of horn or flange.

Pressing the button must, therefore, do something down related using the flangehorn.

I concluded that a push of the button would result in large amounts of feathery duck down being sprayed out of the hornhole into my face.

I declined to push the button.

Lost and found

Found: one miscellaneous item (pictured)

This item and/or apparatus has recently been found on the Pouring Beans estate. We would like to return it to it’s rightful owner. If it is yours, please let us know in the comments, and include proof of your ownership by mentioning something that only the owner of this item would know, such as its serial number, commemorative inscription or a description of its bizarre smell.

If it’s not yours, but you can tell us what it is, we’d be equally interested. Thank you.

A song for Morten

Hello there. Chris here, from the chart-topping band The Papples. Thanks for joining me.

Years ago, when we were hard at work writing and recording songs for our third album, Pop Squared, we made a start on a song about the lead singer of Norwegian pop sensation A-Ha that never saw the light of day.

Well, lucky for you, every dog has his day, and every tired old half-baked Papples idea has its day too. I can now present to you the finished lyrics to a lost classic: “Everybody Fancies Morten Harket”.

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.