The dancing monkey

There are many complex and bewildering technologies to master in my new job, but probably none more complex or bewildering than the robotic dancing alarm monkey.

Alarms go off quite regularly, you see. We look after technical things, lots of them, and the technical things are all wired up to an alarm system, so when something goes wrong it comes up on a screen and an alarm goes off. Then we press a button to make the noise stop and see if anything needs to be done.

The alarm could just come out of a speaker. That would certainly make sense. Instead, though, it’s been wired up to an animatronic monkey with inbuilt speakers. He makes the alarm sound, and he dances from side to side while he makes it. By such means the announcement of a potentially catastrophic system failure is made delightfully charming. This is, with no danger of overstatement whatsoever, one of the best things about my job.

If you have a need to make noises in your job, I would recommend getting yourself a dancing monkey. You won’t regret it.

The balcony

In my new job, I work on the third floor of an old building that has many useless architectural accoutrements and doodads. They’re all things the architect thought would look nice back in 1932, but which now serve no purpose at all, and perhaps they never did.

One of the useless things is a balcony that runs all the way along our side of the third floor, just below the windows. It only seems to be there because someone decided that this side of the building would look a bit more interesting if there was a balcony on it. It’s a very long balcony – perhaps as long as two or three double decker buses parked end to end, or maybe as long as a fireman’s hose, if the fireman’s hose was the same length as two or three double decker buses parked end to end.

It doesn’t look to me like a balcony that I was meant to go and stand on. It’s not very wide, for a start. You could stand on it, and walk along it if you weren’t planning to swing your arms about too much, but you couldn’t put a chair of any kind there, at least not in such a way that you could actually sit on it. The wall along the edge is only just waist high, so you’d feel a bit exposed on it as well.

None of that means that I don’t want to stand on it. Unfortunately, I can’t, because none of the windows open wide enough and the doors – we have two sets of double doors that would open on to it – are locked. The doors are also blocked by some furniture and other piles of tat.

I don’t know why I want to stand on the balcony so much. It would be cold and unpleasant and dangerous, and there would be nothing for me to do once I was out there. There’s no good reason to stand on the balcony. It’s not even a balcony for standing on. That’s why the doors are locked. They aren’t doors for walking through. But none of that changes the fact that I want to stand on it, just for a little bit, just to say I did.

One day it will get the better of me. One day I will climb out of the window. And on that day you will know I made it because you won’t hear from me for a long time, and it will be because I got stuck on the balcony you’re not meant to stand on, and had to be rescued by the fire brigade. And it will be worth it.

The Best of the Papples

Minutes of the initial scoping meeting for the recently proposed “Best of the Papples” album project, held at Pouring Beans Records Inc. head office, as recorded on a tiny piece of kitchen roll.

What kind of alpaca are you?

Here at The Beans, we get a lot of questions and enquiries from our adoring fans, but there’s one issue that comes up more than any other: what kind of alpaca you are. It’s obviously impossible for us to investigate each person in full and answer each letter individually to let people know what kind of alpaca they are. Instead, we’ve produced this handy quiz that you can score for yourself and find out approximately what kind of alpaca you are.

Record your score for each question and then scroll down to find your match.

The Petition

Some time ago now, it became clear that Monty Don was a famous ex-rapper who we all wanted to see back in the game.

I was proud to play my part in collecting signatures for a petition to get him back behind the mic, and I’m prouder than proud – keen, even – to share the petition I collected here.

It’s got its own page in the Things section, or you can just click on the big Monty Dons here.

Smidge on Science: Time

What is time? I don’t know. I mean, I know what It’s Time is – it’s a horrendous album – but I don’t know what time is. And you don’t either. If you think you do, try explaining it to someone, and you’ll immediately hear the ignorance falling stupidly out of your mouth.

Not to worry. Smidge Manly, renowned world expert on railways and Essex, returns once again to the world of science to answer all your questions.

That’s the last in the present series of Smidge on Science. Will he be back? We simply don’t know. Only time will tell.

New beans, please

“One! Ha ha ha. Two! Ha ha ha. Three! Ha ha ha.” The immortal wisdom of the Count.

Here on the Beans, our counting is not done by a furry purple vampire, but by the Bean Counter, an ingenious piece of machinery made from old sofa springs and a second-hand nuclear reactor that we found in a car boot sale. For more than four years now it’s been faithfully counting up our posts and generating new genetically-modified beans and peas as a reward for our performance, while also disgorging between eight and twelve tons of a resinous toxic by-product into the picturesque River Swale each day.

The highly complicated algorithm by which it awards beans has remained the same since early 2014, so it’s no surprise that earlier this year there were calls for an overhaul of the system to better reflect the realities of blogging in the futuristic world of 2018.

The point of the Bean Counter was never to create a level playing field, but rather to produce a playing field with carefully chosen hills and crevices so that we all stand a chance of scoring a Bean each month according to our various blog posting habits. Critics of the existing system pointed out that it was far easier for Ian to score a Bean than anyone else, and that Kev’s time-consuming building projects meant that three posts in a month was an unattainably high bar for him to reach.

I am delighted to announce, as a result, that major engineering works have been completed and the Bean Counter is now operating a completely new set of rules.

Kev will now score a Bean if he makes two (2) posts in a month.
Ian will now score a Bean if he makes precisely three (3) or four (4) posts in a month.
Chris will continue to score a Bean if he makes four (4) or more posts in a month.

Some would say that these new rules should begin operation from this month onwards, and that existing scores should be left alone. Perhaps they should. But I had a go at that and it was really difficult, so the new rules now apply to all previous months as well, causing a major recasting of our historical Bean Counts.

Kev has gained six (6) additional beans for months in which he made two posts.
Ian has lost ten (10) beans for months in which he only made two posts.

This is deeply and inherently unfair, which is unfortunate but unavoidable without further major re-engineering work that will just be an absolute faff.

Your comments, detailed feedback and outright anger will be welcome in the comments section below, but may not amount to much.

Four Word Reviews: Eyes of Innocence

Do you remember the 1980s? Do you like 1980s music? Are you keen to hear all the many sounds of 80s pop music on a single album? Yes, yes, yes and yes: the album for you is Eyes of Innocence, the 1984 debut from Miami Sound Machine, better known as Gloria Estefan plus her husband and some guys who would be quickly forgotten about as her solo career took off. Me? I like some 80s music, yes, but I generally don’t require all of it to be performed on a single album by a single band. And yet that is what I got when the postman pushed this through my door.