Avatar Bank holidays

There’s a serious problem that we have all been completely failing to address, and it’s been going on for too long now. I have decided to fix it. The arrangement of bank holidays across the year is inconsistent, unfair and stupid.

Just look at this chart showing where all the bank holidays fell in 2020. What a mess.

Just spacing them out evenly wouldn’t bring an end to this madness, because there’s only seven of them. That would mean a wait of 52 days between free days off work, a barely acceptable waiting time.

The solution is obvious. More bank holidays, sprinkled evenly throughout the year, so we get one about every two weeks. That’s a massive win. Here’s my suggested list.

  1. New Year’s Day
  2. Blue Monday
  3. Pancake Day
  4. Box Set Thursday
  5. Spring Cleaning Day
  6. St Patrick’s Heavy Drinking Day
  7. Good Friday
  8. Easter Monday
  9. First T-Shirt Day of the Year
  10. Eurovision Day
  11. The Other May Bank Holiday
  12. Boxing Day (relocated)
  13. Wimbledon Finals Day
  14. Beer Garden Friday
  15. Barbecue Day
  16. Holiday Packing Day
  17. Summer Bank Holiday
  18. DFS Sale Day
  19. Steak Pie and Mash Day
  20. Winter Coat Day
  21. Wellies and Leaf Crunching Day
  22. Bonfire Night
  23. Pyjama Wednesday
  24. Christmas Shopping Day
  25. Christmas Day
  26. New Year’s Eve

This results in a much better spread of bank holidays through the year, as shown below.

Please consider this the start of my campaign to enshrine these new bank holidays in law, and also the start of my campaign to be Prime Minister. Thank you.

Avatar New Job: Font Specialist

A little birdy, or a small nest of birdies, told me that a good way to make money was not to embrace pyramid and get rich quick schemes but to design things called fonts and sell them for big bucks.

What are fonts though you may ask? It’s a good job I looked it up so you don’t have to because otherwise we’d both be here all day.

‘Fonts’ are the things that people use to show words on computers so when you’re reading it doesn’t look like a book and smell like an old person. Your eyes need books on a screen (i.e. the world net web) in order to cope with the modern world. Fonts are futuristic and sexy, they’re everywhere too. Look around you: check that shampoo bottle, whip out that business card from the tramp you met on the Underground, peruse the label of those trousers that don’t fit well and make you sit like Buster Keaton. They’re all there staring back at you. In fact by reading this post you have some font looking through your eyes and deep into your soul. This font is… *checks* bouncy. I’m not sure what it’s called. Arthur maybe?

So who makes these fonts then? You can’t make them in a factory like biscuits. It would be handy if you could ask some eggheads to whip up a fresh batch in a laboratory yet that still isn’t right. The only way you can create them is with a pen and paper.

I have been working all five minutes and have come up with three excellent examples of new fonts that will be available to purchase shortly after the unveiling of this post for the rather princely sum of £50,000.00 each. Let’s see what will be up for grabs:

  1. Old Man Jones – have you ever wanted to write like an old giffer? Does your handwriting look too neat and young? What you need is Old Man Jones. It turns your typing into a lower-case, simplified version that practically everybody can read.
  2. Doctor Scrawl – I was once told that my writing looked like a long squiggly line with some dots above it. With this in mind, and the notoriety of illegible words on doctor’s prescriptions, it was easy to mash the two together to make everything you write one long line of, “Eh?”
  3. Future Robot Blim – the future is coming and it wants your fonts. Blast off into the distant year 2022 with this highly effective and high-tech biro-stolen-from-the-branch-of-your-local-bank look with a dash of pomposity and a sprinkle of cyberpunk finesse.

Thank you tiny avian friends for dropping this idea into my brain tub and filling my bank with delicious money.

Avatar Lost and found

Found: one miscellaneous item (pictured)

This item and/or apparatus has recently been found on the Pouring Beans estate. We would like to return it to it’s rightful owner. If it is yours, please let us know in the comments, and include proof of your ownership by mentioning something that only the owner of this item would know, such as its serial number, commemorative inscription or a description of its bizarre smell.

If it’s not yours, but you can tell us what it is, we’d be equally interested. Thank you.

Avatar The Pouring Beans intellectual property portfolio

It occurred to me the other day, when Kev trademarked the name “Metal Horse™”, that we’ve trademarked quite a few terms over the years, and the terms that make up our intellectual property must now be quite substantial.

I have, therefore, conducted several exhausting days* of research to discover just how wide-ranging our various trademarks are, and I can present the results to you now for the first time. So here are all of the Pouring Beans trademarked terms, every last one, in chronological order.

Read More: The Pouring Beans intellectual property portfolio »

Avatar Investment opportunity

For a while now I’ve been looking for my next big business idea that will expand my already substantial entrepreneurial portfolio and take me to the next level. I’m ready to be the next Jeff Bezos and I think I’ve come up with the product that’s going to get me there.

Now, excitingly for you, I’m offering you the once in a lifetime opportunity to get in on the ground floor with the biggest idea of the century. Throw your cold, hard cash my way and reap the benefits. No more work for you. Once this idea takes off the hardest you’ll ever have to work is when you decide which of your tropical beachfront homes you’ll visit next week. Will it be Bermuda or the Seychelles? Goa or Bridlington? The choice, and the gold-plated superyacht, will be yours.

Here’s the pitch. Brace yourself.

What’s big right now? What is everyone into? The internet.

Where are people spending their money? What’s right on the fashions? Internet-enabled objects.

But everything’s on the internet now. Cars, fridges, electric toothbrushes. What part of your life hasn’t been connected to the internet yet?

Easy. Grass.

Grass: worthless without Bluetooth connectivity

Introducing iGrass™, the internet-enabled lawn.

  • Webcams are embedded in your lawn, equipped for 4K video streaming and with nightvision capabilities
  • Microphones at soil level capture every glorious rustle and every growing blade
  • IntelliPoke™ probes infiltrate the underlying strata of leafmould, mulch and root systems to provide real-time feedback on moisture levels, nutrient balance and worm density

These key technologies connect to the iGrass HD app (available for iOS and Android) via Bluetooth, allowing you to monitor your lawn in real time, from wherever you are, and receive automatic push notifications whenever an unwanted weed takes root or a cat has a wee nearby. You can also share pictures, beautiful data infographics and animated GIFs of your digital grass on social media straight out of the app.

Everything is better once it’s connected to the internet and if your frankly mediocre lawn is ever going to turn into something you can be proud of you need to get it online pronto. iGrass™ is the product to help you do it.

Convinced? Of course you are. Quick, chuck me your life savings. You won’t regret it.

Avatar A new thing: photos!

This is something I thought about a while ago, and may also have mentioned, but also may not have. Anyway, whether I mentioned it or not, it has now changed from “a thing I was thinking about” to “a thing I did”.

We’ve all got lots of photos from all the times we’ve met up and done stupid things. All mine are just sitting around on my phone or in folders somewhere on my laptop. That’s useless, when they should really be here on the Beans, in our shrine to three lifetimes misspent doing pointless things that nobody but us find funny.

So I’ve done a bit of faffing and made a photo gallery thing. You can find it by clicking Photos in the menu, or by clicking on these words here.

If you’re like me, and you have photos, then you should also add them, and together we will have lots of photos, which we can look at occasionally, and the rest of the time we will ignore them, just like everything else on this website.

How do I add photos to the things?

Good question.

  1. In the admin interface, go to FooGallery > Galleries, and either create a new one or edit an existing one. If you’re making a new one, give it a name.
  2. Click “add media”. This opens the same interface you use to add photos to blog posts. You can upload pictures or select them from the media library here. Select all the pictures you want to include.
  3. In the sidebar, select how you want them sorted. You can try it by date or by title, depending what works best. You don’t need to change any other settings.
  4. Click publish (if it’s new) or update (if it’s not).

If you made a new gallery, you now need to add it to the album list so it turns up on the photos page. This is easy.

  1. Go to FooGallery > Albums.
  2. Click “edit” on the album “Photos”.
  3. Click the new gallery you created, so it gets a blue tick on it like all the others. You can drag it to another place if the galleries are in the wrong order.
  4. Click update.

You now know as much about this as I do. Hurrah!

Avatar Episode 14: Animal Augmentation

I have to admit this ones a weird one. Usually I give some bullet points of whats going on in the episode but to do that would spoil this one, so you’ll just have to go into it blind.

Good luck.

If you are affected by any of the themes in today’s podcast,… erm… oops.