Avatar Four Word Reviews: Christmas with Mahalia

It’s been the hottest April since records began, or something, with temperatures up to 28°C here in the tropical south last week. The flowers are out in force, bees are buzzing around and the sky is a clear, vivid blue. With all that in mind, then, I am unable to explain why this might be a good time to review Christmas with Mahalia, a 1968 album featuring ten gospel versions of Christmas songs with rich orchestral and choral accompaniment. But evidently it is a good time, because here we are.

Read More: Four Word Reviews: Christmas with Mahalia »

Avatar New: Pouring Beans Fragrances

Look at you. You smell. It’s true – I can smell you from here. What you need is a powerful cosmetic fragrance that will mask your horrendous body odour and the presence of three-day-old kedgeree stuck in your teeth.

Luckily, Pouring Beans has just launched its new line of unisex fragrances. To celebrate launch day, you can get 10% of any of our new toiletries when you order online using the offer code “I REEK”.

Beans No. 5

The warm, homely aroma of uncooked baked beans straight from the tin is unmistakeable in Beans No. 5, with a musky hint of black pepper and overtones of jasmine. It’s the ideal date night fragrance to impress a loved one, a loved-one-to-be or a high-class escort. This stylish eau de toilette is presented in an etched glass bottle in the shape of an open tin of beans. £79.99 (50ml).

Eau de Pouring Body Mist

Make Eau de Pouring Body Mist part of your morning bathroom routine and enjoy its light, fresh scent throughout the day. The dark, sour smell rising from the Character Hatch™ on a hot day is made brighter and sweeter with the musk of wild zorses and the refreshing zing of lemons. £24.99 (150ml) or £49.99 (gift pack: 100ml, presentation box, zorse-striped flannel).

Haricots

Share your bean-based bouquet with your loved one by wearing these delightful matching fragrances for him and for her. Bold, yet playful, both are based on the unmistakable and unforgettable smell of wet plaster and gloss paint from Kev’s house. Haricots Homme carries the bold, earthy overtones of Gary Wilmot’s fading career, whoever he is, while Haricots Femme is lighter, with just a hint of the matted fur lining Flat Kitty’s basket. £39.99 each (75ml) or £54.99 for both.

Our talented Smellologists are now working on a new, secret celebrity fragrance endorsed by Smidge Manly.

Avatar Chips

Pouring Beans is the natural home of democracy. In years gone by we have witnessed landmark votes on key issues that have set the agenda for a generation to come: subjects like meat, socks and playground rides.

Today’s vote is the big one. History calls us. It is time to decide, once and for all, the best kind of chips.

You can, and will, choose one of the following. Or another one if there’s any I’ve missed out.

  1. Chip shop chips
  2. Chunky chips
  3. French fries
  4. Oven chips
  5. Crinkle-cut chips
  6. Triple-cooked skin-on chips
  7. Dirty chips
  8. Those chips you sometimes get in pubs that are sort of wide and flat
  9. Chocolate chips
  10. CHiPs

DEPLOY!

Avatar 2005 calling

It’s now thirteen years since I first had a phone with a camera built into it and decided that I wanted all my phone contacts to be associated with photos of that person on the phone, so when my phone rang it looked like I could see them on the phone.

Since I didn’t get pictures of anyone hanging up, I can only assume these sad, lonely ghosts of 2005 are still on the line, listening to an engaged signal, patiently waiting to talk to me.

I will not answer you, ghosts of the past. Stop calling me.

Avatar A smidge of Smidge

It’s been a few years, but Smidge Manly hasn’t been wasting his time. No, since he finished answering all your questions about railways, he’s been turning his attention to the wider world, and very soon he’ll be ready to explain some of its greatest mysteries to you, his adoring public.

His new series, Smidge on Science, is in post-production right now. In it, he’ll be exploring the four key subjects in the world of science: wind, rain, time and cars.

To whet your appetite, and to remind you again of Smidge’s keen journalistic insight and forensic questioning style, here’s an informative and valuable interview he conducted that didn’t make it into the finished series.

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 The price of Ian’s face

What is Ian’s face worth to you? I wonder if you can even put a figure on it.

I can. Today I learned the exact monetary value of Ian’s face when I went to my local sorting office to collect a mysterious item. It turned out it was a letter sent by Ian’s attorney at law, Nicholas Wolfwood, explaining that he was not going to remove his face and send it to me. He hoped that three signed photocopies of Ian’s face, enclosed with the letter, would do instead.

Unfortunately, Ian’s attorney at law, Nicholas Wolfwood, is a cheapskate who had cut a stamp off another envelope and sellotaped it onto this one so that he didn’t have to actually pay for the postage. The Royal Mail is wise to these tricks, which is why they didn’t push it through my letterbox, and instead they put a yellow sticker on it that said NO POSTAGE PAID and I found a grey card telling me to go get it. When I presented myself at the sorting office, I had to pay £2 – that’s two London pounds – to get hold of it.

Whether or not you think I got value for money out of my two hard earned pounds is a matter of opinion. Whether you think Mr. Wolfwood should have coughed up at least 55p for a second class stamp rather than have me pay nearly four times that for the privilege of receiving his letter is up to you. But one thing is for sure. I now know with some certainty that the value of Ian’s face is about 66p, because I got three of them for two quid.