Category: Not very good

Avatar Ouroboros DVD review

Huh.

Have you ever read something that made so little sense you skipped over it, only for your brain to react much later with an almighty, “you what?” that left you mildly stupified?

I know, that’s a very niche situation. Let me try and explain.

I was reading some reviews of films on CEX. I do this on a regular basis because they’re rarely about the quality of the film itself and contain such poor punctuation and grammar it makes me feel slightly better about my own poor grasp of the English language.

I saw the review above a few days ago and had to come back to it to try and work out the logic (if there is any).

Did he buy it and then get it again? Does he mean that he bought it digitally but because it had such a profound effect on him, because it was such a wonderful and thought-provoking work of art that he purchased a physical version to enjoy forever? Perhaps it’s supposed to be a story about time travel:

“I bought this dvd (present), because i liked it (past), and thought it was brilliant (still past) so I got it (back to the present).”

Who’s to say? You could go round and round and never fully understand the true meaning. I guess we’ll never know what *checks* stewardle was talking about. If only I’d gotten to him earlier. Ten years is too long.

Avatar Ba-na-nay-nay

I woke up on Thursday with a specific purpose. I didn’t know that purpose until I got to work later on that morning.

I was sat next to wor Geoff, who’s always got something interesting to say. We were chatting about interesting jobs and he mentioned bananas.

“Bananas? What do you mean?” I asked. It turns out that on his breaks wor Geoff likes to browse the Internet and goes down rabbit holes of various topics depending on how he’s feeling that day. He mentions that apparently there is a job called an authorised banana weigher. I scoff at such a prospect but a little Google later and I find the details on gov.uk website. There IS a job where you are a person who is officially authorised to weigh bananas. I excitedly scan through the page looking for the details on how to become one and reach a list. In order to become one you have to:

  • have no record of infringement or repeated infringements of customs and tax legislation
  • provide assurance that weighing operations will be performed correctly
  • have access to appropriate and maintained weighing equipment
  • maintain accurate records so customs can carry out controls
  • give customs advanced notice of all weighing operations

It’s beautiful. I can do all of this. All I need is some proper weighing scales and I am golden. I’m about to click on the link to fill the form in, well on my way to being an official banana weigher, and my eyes drift back over the list. I’ve missed one. There’s a fairly important one that I must have glazed over.

  • be involved in the import, carriage, storage or handling of fresh bananas

Boo! Booooo! How am I gonna start importing banana? I’ve got no contacts in the banana industry. I can’t fill in a form and start walking around in big shoes, I have to *actually* do something outside of my comfort zone.

Crestfallen, I close the page and return to my job. The excitement has gone. I will never be fully authorised to weigh my bananas, your bananas or anyone’s bloody bananas.

Avatar Newsboost – unused material (part one)

You may or may not remember the Newsboost Twitter account that I started back in 2014. It was a way of force-feeding mega news into the public subconscious via a steady stream. I ran it for roughly a year before abandoning it as one of those Beans side projects that didn’t quite work out as well as we’d hoped.

I still have the same notebook that I jotted ideas in. Most of them were used but there were some that didn’t make the cut, possibly because they were too “radical” for the time or, which is much more likely, because they were utter nonsense that popped into my head for a moment and there was nothing I could do with it.

Anyway, here’s a short list of what could’ve been:

  • A good chair shouldn’t be sat upon
  • Portable sarcasm
  • Pointy beard serving posts (?)
  • Credit card gifts to children for irresponsible parents
  • Broom jacket
  • Aliens have given up on earth
  • Drive by serenades
  • Recycling man caught littering
  • Skeleton career guidance
  • Polar bears stealing chips
  • Tub Barsley promises a marrow for every household
  • Backwards cutlery for dieters
  • THE NOSE IS THE FACE ON THE BODY OF THE FACE
  • Chicken on drums
  • Slowest tortoise keyboardist fired
  • Big ass television comeback
  • Growling slippers
  • New number set to debut this Autumn
  • Chronic pigs

I’ve listed this as ‘part one’ because after turning over the page there’s so much more and one month where I’m not particularly feeling it, I can whip this out again for a quick win.

Proof that not every idea is a good idea (but every invention is a good invention).

Avatar ABOFB 38: Depressing Food

Ey up Beans fans, we’re back again, right on time, like Black Box but spelled right. This time Chris asks us about the most depressing foods we’ve eaten, we discuss…

  • Generic Fried Chicken
  • Headrow Shopping Centre Food Court Pies
  • Not Roast Potatoes
  • Bad Burgers

Avatar Ian’s holiday snaps – #3

Do you feel like a mystery today? I think you’re looking for a mystery and I’ve got exactly what you need.

As I wandered the barren desolate wasteland of Florida, in the hopes of finding something worthy of my time (tad over dramatic, I know) I kept noticing these signs dotted around the place. I saw some on a highway as we drove to a mall one morning and there were also some lurking around the massive McDonalds.

Who keeps leaving these signs? What kind of website are they proposing? Why are there no details or pictures? Who would be insane enough to give money to a random stranger advertising on the corner of a McDonalds?

I kept imagining some sort of lummox on the other end of the phone and he would spin a wheel for every customer. Whatever the wheel would land on, that’s the website you got. You didn’t have a say in the matter and if you tried to he would send the “website boys” round for a little “chat”.

I’ll never get answers to my questions and, settling into my chair at home, thousands of miles away from website man / woman and their shady empire, I’m quite content to leave it that way.

Avatar Decode this…

What the hell is going on here? On returning to the scout hut after Christmas, we discovered this pictographic story on one of our white boards. What is it saying, and more importantly, what does it mean?

Theories so far range from vampire attack to complex honeytrap operations, but what do you think?

Avatar DiJaBringaBeer

I know nothing about the owner of this house.

Garden wall with a wooden name plate for a house that reads "DiJaBringaBeer"

I know nothing about the owner of this house except that they named their house this.

Imagine coming up with this.

Imagine coming up with it and thinking it was so good, so funny, so enduring in its humour that it wouldn’t just bring you joy and laughter in this one moment where you thought of it, but it would continue to bring you joy and laughter for years to come.

Imagine thinking that it would bring joy and laughter to other people if you stuck it on the front of your house.

Imagine applying to the Royal Mail to change the name of your property. Applying to the council to have it amended in their records. Speaking to people at every bank and utility company who have your details to explain to them, and spell out letter by letter, your brilliant joke, so that it would appear on all the post addressed to you.

Imagine going in to Timpson’s and asking them for a rustic wooden house sign in sustainable pine with bark surround and telling them that this is the word you want them to engrave into it using three-inch-high letters in Chancery Bold Italic.

Imagine that.