Parents, parents, aunt

We’re about to hear from Morrissey, which is a rare and special treat. But first we need an explanation.

Back in December, I posted Christmas mop-up, a list of things I had received. Ian asked who had got me the three things that were not for my new car. I replied that two were from parents and one from an aunt. Ian said I sounded like Essex Highway era Morrissey and asked if I could provide a sample of Morrissey’s voice saying those words.

Which brings us to where we are today, and the soft, crooning tones of the former Smiths frontman informing us where three of my Christmas presents came from.

Four Word Reviews: Doing it My Way

It’s been a long time since we last dipped our toes into the chilly water of Four Word Reviews – seven months, in fact. That’s largely because the mysterious supply of terrible CDs has been slowing down lately. Still, there’s one here now, and that is an album that’s ten years old this month: Doing it My Way by the 2006 X Factor runner-up Ray Quinn.

There’s not much to say about this album – as we will see – for the simple reason that it’s an album of swing cover versions. It contains exactly the songs you would expect and they’ve all been recorded and performed in exactly the same way as all the hundreds of other albums like this that have been churned out over the years. Everyone from Robbie Williams to Jason Manford has had a pop at it, and they all basically sound like this.

In this specific case, Ray Quinn was all of 19 years old when he came second (second!) in the X Factor, and he was whisked away to Los Angeles to record this album at Capitol Records Tower, in the very studio where Frank Sinatra belted out some of these songs in a more genuine way many years before. I read that on Wikipedia and it might be the single most depressing thing about the whole album. Wait, no, this is: it was a gold-selling album in 2007 and Ray Quinn became the first artist to score a number 1 album without ever releasing a single.

Track	Title	Word 1	Word 2	Word 3	Word 4
1	Ain’t That a Kick in the Head	Literally	no	opinions	here
2	Fly Me to the Moon	Weirdly	flutey	and	arhythmic
3	My Way	Limper	than	Frank’s	Way
4	That’s Life	Violently	offensive	Hammond	organ
5	Mack the Knife	Robbie	sang	it	better
6	Smile	Tuned	this	one	out
7	The Way You Look Tonight	Urgh.	Creepy	crooning	crescendo
8	Summer Wind	Generic	swing	sung	generically
9	What a Wonderful World	Is	this	even	“swing”?
10	Mr. Bojangles	OK	song	made	tedious
11	New York, New York	No	York	No	York

It’s quite hard to have an opinion about this album because it’s all songs you’ve heard a hundred times before sung in exactly the way you’ve heard them sung a hundred times before. It offers nothing new. You have to listen pretty hard to work out it’s this generic singing guy and not one of the thousands of other blokes with halfway decent voices who have chosen to tread this heavily congested road. It lacks any sincerity. A 19 year old can’t really sing “My Way” and hope to make you think they mean it, not that this particular 19 year old sounds much like he’s trying. Some of the more upbeat and jazzy numbers have been made quieter and less jazzy for some reason. It’s a big, brass-heavy sigh of a record.

In summary, my favourite thing about this album was that I could sometimes forget it was this X Factor guy singing it and let it wash over me like it was literally any other album of identical-sounding swing covers. My least favourite thing was “New York, New York” being turned into a sort of stodgy, plodding recital. Even I give that song more welly if I sing along to it.

Things not to do

In the last 24 hours I have learned a lot. Here are some things you should not do.

When making a very short journey of just a few minutes in your car, don’t empty your pockets in the normal way, placing your wallet, phone and keys into the space below the radio. You might forget them when you get out.
Don’t time your journey to arrive at your destination – for example, a garage where you’re leaving it overnight because it’s booked in for some work in the morning – eight minutes before they close.
In your rush to get through the door and hand them your car key, don’t forget to take everything you need. For example, when you’ve picked up your wallet and phone and put them back in your pockets, don’t forget to have a look and see if your house keys are still in the car before you get out and lock it.
Don’t wait until you’ve made a 25 minute journey home (including some walking, some waiting for the bus and some sitting on the bus) before looking for your house keys. If you wait that long you will only realise you haven’t got them when you’re standing outside the building where you live and you’re unable to get into it.
Don’t make a 25 minute journey back to a now-closed garage (for example, it’s just an example) because when you get there you will find that your car has been helpfully moved by one of their staff inside a gated and locked compound, and is now tantalisingly visible but completely inaccessible behind an eight foot metal gate with spikes on. If you happened to leave, I don’t know, your house keys in it, you will not be able to get them.
If you decide to ignore this advice, and you are welcome to do that if you want, then at least heed this warning: don’t do all the things above on the one night in several months when your flatmate is three hours away seeing his family and there is nobody at home who can let you in.

If there are any more things you should not do, please rest assured I will end up inadvertently doing them at some point, and I will come back and let you know about them so you don’t have to do them yourself.

Thanks.

2018 State of the Beans Address

Thank you, thank you. You’re very kind. Please be seated.

My name is Professor Sir Elbert Louche OBE, and it is a great pleasure to return to the Beans for a fourth year to deliver the annual State of the Beans Address. As in previous years, the information I am about to share with you is the result of detailed scientific investigation that has been ongoing for the past twelve months.

We at the University of the Internet take this very seriously. We have all been wearing white coats and goggles, and there were absolutely loads of bunsen burners involved.

Unfortunately, for the second year in a row the news is not good and I have to report a decline in Beans activity. A total of 84 posts were made to the Beans in 2017, down ten on the 2016 total, and the comment situation is no better, with 989 comments made, a year-on-year reduction of almost 400.

This increasingly slapdash approach to blog posting has not gone unnoticed and the Home Office are threatening to put the website into special measures unless the situation improves during 2018. Nobody wants that. Standard procedure for “special measures” websites are to replace all content with cat pictures and open the comments section to cretins who can’t spell and always use emoji instead of punctuation. This is a situation to be avoided at all costs.

Here’s the breakdown for each member.

Ian

Ian made 37 posts, four fewer than in 2016. Last year he said he looked forward to “shitting over everyone again in 2017”. He will now be required to submit a written explanation about the lack of progress on this objective. However, he did score 12 beans.

Chris

Chris made 41 posts in total, more than Ian, but they were not consistently spread through the year, meaning he only earned 8 beans. His post count is also down by four on last year’s total. He loses the right to use proper glasses for fizzy drinks and from now on will have to use disposable plastic cups.

Kev

Kev made six posts to the Beans in 2017, fewer than the eight he made in 2016. This comes as no surprise to anyone, though if we wish to grasp at straws to find something in his favour, he came closer to matching his 2016 post count than Chris or Ian. We do not need to discuss Kev’s bean total.

In conclusion, 2017 has been an exceptionally quiet year and unless 2018 sees considerably more posts being made and comments being left, I am going to be quite cross. There is no commemorative goblet for anyone this year, and instead you will find that while you were in here listening to this speech all your cars have been keyed.

Thank you.

The Book

Rejoice! The Book, bane of the Beans for nine long years, is finished! Now a prestigious company (Pouring Beans Publishing) has rushed out a massive print run (three copies) to an eager and very excited audience (us). It may henceforth be referred to by its title, The Magic Star, or by its actual real genuine ISBN number, 978-1-38-934293-6, or just as “The Book” which is what we’ve been calling it since January 2009.

If reading the actual book is not enough, you can now also read it online, a bit like a modern e-book on a Kindle or something, except it’s just a PDF on the website. It is here in our vastly underused Things section.

Hooray!

Christmas mop-up

Another Christmas has died and been buried in the garden. The tree is crackling nicely in the fireplace and the leftover cake has been used to block up a hole in the kitchen wall where a pipe used to come through.

Let’s see how we did.

Wearables

Pack of ten socks

Edibles

Box of orange Matchmakers

Readables

Jeremy Paxman’s autobiography

Motoring accessories that duplicate things I got for free in a nice presentation pack from the garage when I bought my new car but I’m too polite to tell anyone

Paintwork cleaner
Dashboard polish
Bug shifter sponge
Car washing sponge
De-icer spray
Screenwash

Christmas Dessert War

Christmas is nearly here. The season of eating a bit too much and feeling very full all day and still somehow continuing to eat Celebrations all afternoon. The season of Many Desserts.

This is the Christmas Dessert War. Pick a side and choose your favourite. Only one can survive*.

The candidates are:

Christmas pudding (with brandy sauce or custard, don’t mess me about with a drizzle of cream, nobody wants cream)
Christmas cake (with icing AND marzipan, and ideally a slice of Wensleydale on the side)
Yule Log (don’t choose this)
Other (please specify)

I choose Christmas pudding with brandy sauce. And if you don’t want any I’ll have yours.

(* all the desserts will survive and continue to be available for eating)

Selling a car

Are you tired of being able to move around at speed with the radio on and feel like maybe you’d prefer staying in the same place and owning more money instead? Then perhaps you’d like to sell your car.

Before the fall of the People’s Democratic Republic of Great Britain, you could only sell your car to the National People’s Used Car Supermarket, where the secret police would beat you until you agreed to their low, low prices. But nowadays there’s lots of ways to sell a car.

All those websites that say they buy any car dot com

They’ll tell you on their website that your car is worth an amount that is actually slightly higher than what you paid when you bought it. Then they make an appointment for you to go in and sell it to them. When you arrive (at a dirty portakabin at the wrong end of a supermarket car park) a disinterested man will ask you lots of questions, photograph the car from all angles and then take it for a desultory test drive before phoning his boss in, I don’t know, Milton Keynes or Stockholm or Barbuda. They will then offer you £300 for it. You say you know the car is worth more than that and on the website their estimate said £45,000 and a gold tiara. The man sighs like you’re one of the difficult ones and phones his boss back and says OK, they can go up to £350. You leave.

Trade it in

If what you actually want is another car (seriously, what’s wrong with you, you’ve got a car, just drive that for god’s sake, what do you want a different one for, they’re basically all the same) then you might be able to give your car to the person who is selling you the new car. That way you give them a car and some money instead of giving them some money and some more money. When you do that they will look at it and nod thoughtfully and tell you the microscopic scuff on the paintwork that is so small you’ve never actually seen it before knocks a bit of value off the car, and then they offer you £450 for it. You leave, saying you’ll sell it elsewhere instead. Like, seriously, just keep the car you have and drive that, you cretin, what are you even putting yourself through all this for.

Sell it privately

The person who will pay the most for your car is some idiot off the street who knows no more about cars than you do and who isn’t aware that it’s worth either £350 or £450 depending on which professional shyster you ask. All you have to do is make them aware of it. To do that you photograph it from every angle and list it on a website that trades autos. They list a phone number on their website that connects directly to your mobile number and for the next few days you keep receiving phone calls from sullen, suspicious-sounding men with a range of intimidating accents who sound like people you would normally cross the street to avoid. They ask you questions you don’t think you’re qualified to answer and try to beat you down on the asking price before they’ve even come to see the damn thing. You hope one of them just buys it and goes away soon so you can take down the advert and end your time as a chat line for middle aged men who are obsessed with timing belts and vehicle tax bands.

Next steps

When you have sold your car, don’t forget to buy another car with the money so you can go through the whole exhilarating process again in a few years’ time.