King for a Day

Early. Bleary-eyed. Rummaging through emails before work and there it is.

Now I have my fair share of luck like everyone else. I’m not swimming in lottery wins yet occasionally the cosmos chucks me a bone and a I manage a few numbers in the Chunderball. It’s a balancing act no doubt due to my years of annoying people and general sanctimonious behaviour. Yes, me. Look at me.

“Congratulations! You’re our Mastercard Competition WINNER!”

I’m your what the what now? This email sat in my inbox is telling me I’m a winner. It is praising me for winning more than anyone else. I am a winner. I have won a VIP trip for two adults to attend the UEFA Champions League Final Madrid 2019. I would rather stick my eye sockets in a paste of pepper and lemon juice than have anything to do with fucking football but even so, it does come with hotel accommodation and a £250.00 prepaid card so I can stick twos up at the final and go off to get hammered in some squalid Spanish bar, where the locals can pick my pocket when I am stumbling back to my hotel room around 7pm or however long it takes for me to get wasted these days.

This is pushed to one side by my acute distinct overwhelming sense of pessimism. “What do you think you’re doing? You actually believe you’ve won a competition? When did you enter this competition”

“I… I erm I don’t er… I didn’t?”

“Well done, genius! You didn’t. Why on earth would you have entered a competition to win tickets to the UEFA Champions League Final? It’s clearly a sham. It’s a fake. They’re trying to scam your sorry ass for a quick buck.”

Having checked the details, even though it looked like a genuine email I was inclined to agree with my pessimism that it was some hoodlums attempting swindle the last few pennies from my account. Like with all great phishing scandals, I sent a message to Zavvi saying that I had received an email that looked about as legitimate as a Smidge Manly Coco Loco advertisement from Spain, and asked them to verify if this was the case. I received a response a few hours later, two responses in fact. It seems as though a lot of people had received the same email I had because the first reply was a mass-produced email from Zavvi apologising for their error. This was further confirmed by the poor customer service adviser who had to message me back to say that I had not won the tickets, as well as several tweets from people on Twitter who had gone through the same highs and lows as I had.

So in one sense I have missed out on the chance of flying to Spain to live out a brief fantasy of downing alcohol in a foreign country. On the other hand though I have avoided a poxy holiday based around a shit game of football.

Hotter Otter out.

Underneath my car

We are truly living in the future now. In the past, when I’ve taken my car to the garage for one reason or another, the mechanics have done things to it and given it back to me, and it looks the same. I just see the shiny outside of the car and not the rest of it.

Well, no more. My new car came with a service plan and yesterday it had its first annual service. And now, apparently, the annual service doesn’t just mean that the car gets checked over and serviced inside and out – it also means that the mechanic takes a video of the underside of your car while it’s up on the ramp so you can see the bits of it you can’t normally see. Then they text it to you and it’s there for you to watch on a special website for ever and ever.

Obviously, I found this thrilling, so I’ve set the video to some music and invite you to join me on a voyage of discovery as we travel… underneath my car.

Healthy eating

Christmas is over and we’ve all eaten a bit too much. Too many roast potatoes*. Too many chocolates. Too much cake.

What you need is something healthy. Something full of nutrition. Something light and fresh. And thankfully, I have just the thing. Presenting the Pouring Beans 2018 Burger and Salad Special, a meal that superficially looks like burger and chips but which cunningly includes a generous helping of lush, healthy greenery. Enjoy!

Salad (with burger and chips on the side)

* I’m being silly, of course. There is no such thing as too many roast potatoes.

The Third Kind of Water

The people have spoken and…

“I demand a third water, beyond simply still or fizzy. Something else. Creamy water, maybe, or extra dry water. Something like that.”

… is what they said. Never let it be said that here at Pouringbeans we don’t give the people what they want. We do, we always do, and we give them it in spades. SPADES!

Without any more fuss, let me present to you, straight from the ever-busy laboratories of Kevindo Menendez…

Antimatter Water

In an interview with New Scientist, Menendnez said:

Antimatter Water was been produced at great expense to satisfy the urges of one egocentric numpty. However in the process we created something beautiful. Its impossible to drink, and if you mix it with normal water, they both disappear, so NEVER do that. EVER. It could cause some unknown science stuff… probably.

The article goes on to state that “In 1999, NASA gave a figure of $62.5 trillion per gram of antihydrogen” so we can only gasp in awe at the sheer cost of the singular glass of Antimatter Water that Menendez managed to create.

The glass of impossibly expensive anti-water will be presented to a Mr. C. Marshall, along side a selection of budget waters from Aldi, at an upcoming meeting to discuss the ludicrous installation of additional eyes to Mr. Marshall’s face.

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.

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.

Dedication

Dedication. Say it out loud because you won’t be hearing much of that word for much longer. Why? Because dedication has a new name and that name is Christopher James Marshall.

Lunacy is infectious, much like laughter and most Class A drugs. Lunacy is responsible for a lot of things and I expect when they eventually drag me away, kicking and screaming, wrapped in a My Little Pony sleeping bag, it will be something that I try to pin the blame on in the hope they’ll let me go. When it comes to a lot of my nonsense it’s about 50/50 as to whether anyone else will join in. Some of it is too much, even for me, so I fully understand when people choose to ignore and carry on with their lives. For instance, this morning I was thinking about Loudermilk (again), an old animal’s home for all of Bob Ross’ woodland creature friends and Korean Karaoke (because it sounds nice).

Occasionally though the baton will be picked up and well and truly ran all the way to the finishing line. That baton was a petition to reinstate Monty Don back in the band Beats International. Even though none of that sentence makes sense in the real world, Chris took that petition and got it fully signed.

Two hundred and eleven individual signatures. Two hundred and eleven people. People may scoff that our generation never amounted to anything but I will wave this petition in their faces to prove them wrong. What an achievement. What a level of dedication unheard of in this day and age. So based on this and this alone, the word ‘dedication’ should be replaced with ‘Chris Marshall’.

What a level of Chris Marshall unheard of in this day and age.

You heard me.

Stop your life! Everyday solutions

What do you do when you want to talk to girls? Do you have a manual that you refer to?
WRONG. Books cannot help. What about some chat up lines?
WRONG. They never work, they’ve been heard a million times before and you’ll sound like a cheese ball. What you need is the Smoochies Inc patented Incense Talk to Girls System*.

In order to cope with the crazy world of women you need a foolproof method. We have your back and we have your method. All you need is the Smoochies Inc Incense Talk to Girls system in your back pocket. Whilst it may look like a picture of incense sticks from the shop I wandered into this weekend, it’s actually the secret to talking to the ladies.

Picture this: you can talk normal people proper but when it comes to the opposite sex you struggle. Whip out the ITG system and you’ve got everything you need. Assimilate the names into any sentence for instant sex appeal. For example:

“Hey Sweet Fig, strap on your Lavender Blue and we’ll be Just Peachy.”

“Oh French Vanilla, you put the Fizzy Pop in my Nag Champer.”

“Girl, when you take me to your Butterfly Garden I am gonna Black Love your Mango.”

There is no way you can go wrong. You’ll be winning with women before you know it. Clear out your diary because you are booked for the next few months, Casanova. And so on. Smoothies Inc – guaranteed (ish).

*Not to be confused with the Smooches Inc patented Girl Talk System.