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.

Girly handwriting

In the office at work, my colleague Hal is looking at the equipment book and trying to work out who borrowed something without bringing it back. We write the name of the person and the thing they took and the date we expect it back, and normally we can just recognise the handwriting of the person who signed it out.

“I don’t know who signed this out,” says Hal.

“Whose handwriting is it?” says Annie who is sitting at the desk.

“I don’t know,” says Hal, placing the book on the desk and pointing at it. “Have a look. It’s in really girly handwriting.”

I walk over and have a look at the book.

“It’s my handwriting,” I say.

“Sorry,” says Hal, “but it is very girly.”

The most infuriating fruit

The survey results are in. The winner’s name is being carved onto the award. Pomegranate is the most infuriating fruit. It’s a fact. You know it’s true.

Its name is clearly pronounced “pom-e-gran-it” but for some reason it’s spelled with the letters “ate” at the end. Ridiculous.
The outer skin is designed to only come off in a thousand leathery flakes.
The edible bits are approximately one million tiny bloblets of fruit. Before you can eat them you have to excavate them all in a sort of miniature mining project. This takes absolutely forever.
When you eat the edible bits you find that the nice juicy tasty bit takes up only about half of it and the rest is a woody seed that gets stuck in your teeth.
The edible bits are actually called “arils” which is just pretentious. Gaaaaah. I hate it.

On the other hand they do taste nice.

Beverage news

Are you tired of drinks that are grumpy, uncouth or simply downright rude? Do you long to quench your thirst with a liquid that’s polite and mild-mannered?

Then look no further.

At last, a drink with manners. A tipple fit for gentlemen. Courtesy Water will give you the refreshing taste of water and the full package of pleases and thank yous in a single 2-litre bottle.