Avatar Driving Observations

So it’s been about four months since I passed my test and steadily I have gotten used to the bizarre idea of driving around without someone criticising every mistake I make, at least not inside the car. There are several critics in other cars desperate to point out my shortcomings. It has come to my attention though that the five gears of an automobile have their own personalities and it wasn’t until I started driving on my own that my mind could comprehend the uniqueness of each.

It’s only fair then that I compile a list in numerical order:

First Gear (the Angry Gear)

First gear doesn’t like you. It makes this very apparent seconds into driving. It’s loud and shouty and if you don’t stop using it and move into second it’s going to do something VERY BAD to you. So you change up to…

Second Gear (the Confused Gear)

You’ve made it past the short tempered one and into the gear that is never sure whether it should be slow or fast. You try to tempt it one way, not happy. You put your foot down to speed up, not happy. The only way to bring it a shred of contentedness is to move on.

Third Gear (the Boring Gear)

Your “best friend”. I seem to spend a lot of my time cruising residential streets in third gear. There’s not much to it. Once you push it into third you hear yourself tutting because it tries too hard to please you without any success. Nobody likes a try hard.

Fourth Gear (the Smooth Gear)

Slip into fourth and things seem much better. You’ve got some speed now, you’re building it up, you feel like some progress is finally getting made. It’s a good gear to be in. You cream around curves like a crab covered in custard. But uh oh, you’ve accelerated faster than you should have and need to prepare for…

Fifth Gear (the Couldn’t Give a Toss About Anything Gear)

Stepping into fifth is mostly good. You’re there at the top of the spectrum. You can only go faster now, and faster you will because you can. Shame then that if you happen to hit something at this speed you’ll more than likely die. If you had an accident in third it would call an ambulance and put you in the recovery position. Fifth wouldn’t even take off its headphones to check if you were still alive, and it’d spit on you as it drove off into the horizon.

When you’re driving look out for these character traits. For a fun car game why not give them names and draw cartoon versions of them on napkins? Not you though, you’re driving. It would have to be someone else. If you have friends, that is.

Avatar Welcome to 2005!

Welcome to the scary new world of 2005, George Bush has just been re-elected over in the USA, Former Nazi Pope Benedict has been elected the new Pope, Charles and Camilla are to marry and a new video service called YouTube is launched.

Being at the forefront of all that is technological here at the ‘Beans, we now have our own YouTube Channel, replete with  (count it…) ONE VIDEO!

More will follow very soon. Here’s hoping that moving from the relative obscurity of Vimeo, we might actually get someone to watch our videos (yeah right).

PouringBeans on YouTube!

Avatar Kevin’s Beans

The new website has been up for a while now and seems to be doing swimmingly. There has been a wealth of information passed between these hallowed halls and I don’t know about you but my life has been fully enriched as a result of all the posts.

There’s someone though who hasn’t really seen the benefit. Our Kev, Mr Chang, Senor Menendez, whatever you want to call him, has been too busy watering his shutter pipes and shining the biff rafters to contribute anything. His bean count is very low and so in order to try to boost his levels I have come up with the following product:

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This way Kev will have a multitude of promiscuous beans the whole year round and doesn’t need to worry about those pesky hard, dried up peas.

Avatar The end (probably) of #TapSaga

That’s it. It’s over. For now at least anyway.

If anyone ever suggests to you that changing the taps in the bathroom is a quick and easy way to ‘refresh’ your room, my advice is to punch them swiftly in the face.

btaps staps

 

Let me give you a summary of what has gone on so far in #TapSaga in abbreviated bullet list format:

Read More: The end (probably) of #TapSaga »

Avatar 2015 State of the Beans Address

Good afternoon. Settle down please. Thank you. Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Professor Louche, and it is my privilege to deliver the 2015 State of the Beans Address.

A full analysis of the activities of the last year has been conducted by our team of expert analysts and we are able to describe the current position of the website to within four millimetres.

Summary of the year

In January 2014 The Beans was relaunched with a renewed intent to operate as a blog website with posts and comments and that.

Throughout the year lots of posts were made by everyone, except Kev who was too busy grouting his drainpipes to join in.

Together we have achieved a total of 82 posts and 784 comments, some of which were actually fairly interesting.

Contribution of what individual contributors have contributed

Ian was issued a target of making two, three or four posts per month. He scored ten beans in 2014, having achieved this ten times. He would have scored eleven beans but a terrible problem with the space-time continuum meant that one of his July posts was actually in August. Ian has, however, yet to fill in his Not About Ian page.

Chris was issued a target of making at least four posts per month. He scored six beans, and his normal performance was to make the required number every other month, with a fallow period at other times. Most of his posts had a picture in them. Chris filled in his Not About Chris page with a load of outright lies.

Kev was issued a target of making at least three posts per month, which was revised down from an original target of four. He scored two beans over the course of 2014 because he mostly wasn’t here. We don’t need to discuss whether he filled in the Not About Kev page.

Conclusion

2014 has been a very strong start to the New Beans and Ian has been the winner. Well done everyone.

Avatar The Kevindo Menendez Birthday Memorial Tribute Night Out – 2014 Edition

What happens when your birthday is shit, like dirt dog ass shit? When it feels as though someone has taken the time to use a straw to blow shit all over you and your life and then refuse to clean it up?

Thankfully this isn’t what happened on Kev’s birthday. It was a little weak but the company was swift and then getting wrecked at his parent’s house is always a welcome change from hanging out with the twelve year olds at the Gascoigne’s. It seemed fair though that in order to restore the balance something was required to levitate his birthday out of the doldrums and back into what scientists are now calling “Acebag Territory”.

How does one do this? It’s incredibly difficult to justify a birthday night out a full sixty four days after the day of the birthday itself. Luckily I’m not someone who feels the need to justify most of anything I do. So we did. The guest list was so exclusive only two people were invited. The timing was so tight there wasn’t enough time for pre-drink drinks or post-drink drinks. It was straight into the drinks. Here are a list of things we learned:

  1. For the first two or three bars we witnessed several common phenomena which continued to repeat itself. Whichever place we went to would eventually have most of the patrons gone by the time we left. We also ran into pairs of lesbians as well as several other people who caught the same train into Leeds as we did.
  2. Johnny Bobbins runs the tiny ticket desk at Leeds train station. When you don’t get a chance to buy a ticket on a train you have to visit his window where he uses his ticket machine from 1975 to produce one for you so you can get through the barriers. Kev has absolutely no respect for Johnny Bobbins. I do, but only so far as where his job is concerned. When he dresses up as a sexy witch I draw the line; whatever he wants to do in his free time is nothing to do with me.
  3. The title for the evening was not decided properly until after the evening was over.
  4. No matter where I go, no matter what I’m doing, I still seem to be able to attract both people I know and strangers. In this instance it was a guy from Hull for giving some change to a homeless man, a woman I work with also on a night out in Leeds and then some guy advertising a strip club who insisted he could help us get in with his help. I know I’m pushing 30 but I think I could make it down the steps unaided.
  5. Don’t snaffle a full bag of Doritos after excessive drinking; it’ll make your mouth extra furry in the morning.
  6. The Mixing Tin does no longer exist, and hasn’t for some time. Getting a drink there was excessively hard.

It’s clear that this should therefore be a regular thing. I invite everyone reading this to sign up for next year’s entry in the hope of broadening the horizons of the Kevindo Menendez Birthday Memorial Tribute Night Out.

Broaden indeed.

Avatar Things on my Desk: Unloved Sauces

Today I looked round my desk and was faced with a sight that is all too common in modern Britain.

The grim truth is that we all take too many sachets of sauce from the cafe or canteen, we just do. Whether its some sort of instinctive nesting impulse or just the fact that we can get something for free so we do. The untold story though is what happens to all of these unwanted sauces once they are taken from the  relative comfort of the canteen stainless steel container. Do they ever make their way home? No, for once they have been removed they somehow become dirty. Nobody has opened them, nobody has licked them, but they can never go back, they are alone. Destined to see out their expiry dates in the back of an office drawer, or become a ticking time bomb in the pocket of someone who never checks their pockets before doing the washing.

Spare a thought for the unloved sauces.

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