Missing, presumed busy

Dearly beloved we are gathered here today to cast a keen eye over the mostly-absent third member of the Beans trio, Mr Kevin Hill.

Hill is not dead or missing after hiking through the foothills of Cheveley or anything suspicious like that. We know that he’s still flobbiting about somewhere, possibly in his lovely house or one of the many, many locations he has to drop and/or pick up his kids from.

He has a made-up job title (at least according to his Linked-In profile) and may or may not still be running some kind of poodle grooming business on the side. Is this what takes up all of his time? Are dogs the reason he doesn’t visit anymore? Expert analysists seem to suggest so.

The important thing is that we remember he is still a thing and remembering is fun. Though he may have abstained from posting anything for the last eight hundred years, though his track record of editing and uploading the podcasts is as sketchy as an afternoon with Vincent Van Gogh, Kevin is still a valuable edition to the team and we all look forward to seeing his cheery little face once again.

A reminder of old reminders

I use the “reminders” app on my phone quite a lot, because I am forgetful. It’s clever because you can get it to remind you about something at a particular time, and then once you tick the reminder to say you’ve done it, it just disappears. Poof! Gone.

Except it’s not gone, it seems. If you open up one of the menus and tell it to show you completed reminders, there they all are. All of them. Mine go right back to 2011.

I had a scroll through and most of them are very boring. Some of them are not. Here are some things I have been reminded to do in years gone by.

I don’t know what most of these mean.

Go to bloody Richmond FFS
Crisps
Windy tomorrow
Hotel?????
Fg
More wontons
Dentist/ear/tip
Post Ian a picture of a fist
R4 debacle
Go go go
Listen to the thing
Look for workman
Brioche and food
Family pictures sending please
Ask about onion soup
Friday
The Hoodie Problem
Mike is going to phone you at 4
Remind Steve to freeze three (3) breaded chicken breast fillets and retain one (1) chicken breast steak in the refridgerator
AAAAAAAAAAAA
Clean crap out of headphone jack
Tinsel, silver: six metresworth
Hello! Sorry for the slow reply, I was at work and then I was very, very asleep.
Eyyyyyy mate
Make some decisions
UKIP weather
Pester Kev
Give Joe ten pounds Sterling
Post to the Beans

Box lid

Recently I was shuffling some nonsense around and stuffing more boxes into the solitary cupboard at my flat in the hope of creating a little more space.

As I was tearing up some old cardboard I found that a young Reuben had doodled on the inside of one of the smaller boxes.

For those whose eyesight is not as good as it used to be, the top has ‘secret files’ and several incriminating piece of information about walruses. Roy Orbortron (the robotic version of Roy Orbison who was created to carry on his musical legacy) is a walrus for some reason and he has changed the words of the classic song ‘Pretty Woman’ to ‘Pretty Walrus’. This may have been done in the hopes of attracting a mate although nobody can doubt the controversial nature of this switch.

But wait! There’s more!

Roy Orbotron (different spelling) also orbits the planet Venus as a disgusting Transformers-esque robot walrus meaning that he must split his time equally between serenading female walruses with his back catalogue and flying around the second nearest planet to the sun. Thankfully he didn’t choose a planet that was further away otherwise he’d never have enough time between the two feats to organise, I don’t know, a summer holiday. Quite why he is orbiting Venus is not explained in the document.

If you have any clearer answers then do let us know. For now, watch out for any suspicious walruses or walrus-based robots who may or may not be flying through the sky and/or playing the guitar (boy this post is exhausting to write).

Beans flashback: Chris gives blood

Can you believe that one of the defining moments of my life, and probably of yours too, was ten years ago today? The New Beans didn’t exist back then, so I didn’t record this for posterity as a blog post. The ten year anniversary seems like a good time to put that right.

The ‘Ianiest’ thing

We’ve crept into 2023. I side-stepped in a few days ago, crimsonly of course, and it looks and feels very much like 2022. There’s a distinct 2022 sheen over the whole thing. I expect this is how most years will be now, a smear of what happened previously, everything looking awfully familiar with only a few choice moments to differentiate the two. Yes, I know that does sound awfully bleak for the first post of the year. I’m fine with it and you should be too, so deal with it.

The good news is that based on the comments from my last post it seems like a great time for a poll;

What is the most ‘Ianiest’ thing ever?

We all know that the years have been littered with a lot of ‘Ian’ stuff from things that I’ve said to things that I’ve done or even things that I said I would do. Here’s a few that immediately come to mind:

The time I decided to eat a raw red onion and asked Reuben to film me doing it. It took about four attempts because of the strength of the onion. I couldn’t taste anything else for the next three days.
Sending letters out as audio tapes on a Dictaphone (aka ‘the Mackford Files’).
The time you were both visiting and we took Reuben out to the park. When it started raining (I hate this, why did I do this?) I took off my t-shirt and used it to dry the slide so Reuben wouldn’t get wet.
After a night out, standing in the queue for the takeaway behind some policemen, throwing up quietly into a plastic cup because I’d drank too much.
Trying to bring back the “finger wiggle dance” from the 1920’s and 1930’s to the 21^st century with very little success (which, after a very brief look on the internet, may be called ‘Truckin’ – “The right hand is held up (as in a right turn signal) with the index finger extended and wagging.”) I’m still working on the Lindy Hop.
Getting half-cut off three pints, catching an Uber home, cooking Reuben’s tea, doing the washing up and then hopping on a bus back to town for more drinks.

Given that our subscription numbers are decidedly low, it will not be a vote and instead all submissions will be judged by myself and assembled into a numerical list in a future post. I will have the final say on what is the ‘Ianiest’ of all time although I will allow some general input once the top five (or three, or two if the cupboards are running dry) has been compiled. This therefore guarantees me a future post which is a win in my book.

I’ve done too many things to remember so I need your help to recollect because, as we all know, “Remembering is fun”.

We definitely need to copyright that at some point.

Twenty one years on

A year ago, when it was twenty years on from the founding of Zyurisizia, I wrote a post about the fledgling nation that Ian and I helped to birth, and we had a short conversation about what its flag looked like.

My contribution was only that I had “a feeling it involved triangles”. Ian dredged up slightly more detail, recalling “triangles and a red circle, a bit like the Chinese flag”, though in what way that resembled the flag of China, which has no triangles and no red circle, I don’t know. We then recalled that territory was claimed by fastening the flag to the longest pole we could find, and planting that in the ground in various places.

Luckily I have now found my Office Memorabilia CD, so after a year of impatient waiting, you’ll be pleased to know the answer is now with us.

The capital city, which was the Office, was claimed with a hand-drawn flag on a 30cm ruler.

We then moved on to claim the Wildlife Area a few days later, by which point we had a more professional flag on a metre ruler.

I haven’t visited the Scholars Gate housing development to check, but I assume the flag is still prominently flying there somewhere.

For your peace of mind, this is probably all the Zyurisizia nostalgia there is to be had, so next year you’re probably safe from a “twenty two years on” type post. Still, lots of fun was had by all concerned.

Mysterious shed

Picture this:

Two men are sat watching some good old fashioned rock and roll music at a gig. They’ve already had to endure the poor organisational skills of Huddersfield, Wetherspoons meals without the drinks (because the wait for drinks was longer than the food for some reason), rain, snow, sleet, drunk Yorkshire idiots and a winding, zig-zagging queue to get inside.

The support act were fine. The sun came out and the woman took her top off. If only the sound system was decent enough to make what she was shouting about audible but you can’t have everything I suppose.

The first band came on and despite numerous jokes at their expense (not from me), a jolly good time was had by all, especially when they did a rousing cover of ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallic and a soothing rendition of ‘Africa’ by Toto.

The second band began their set with a weird recorded message by some semi-famous actor guy who I recognise the face of but can never remember his name. About four songs in the band suddenly decided to leave the stage.

“What’s going on?” everyone asks.

Cue the stagehands and roadies going backstage and trying to wheel on what can only be described as the world’s most unnecessarily large shed (FYI it looked more like a log cabin to me, Kev’s description is the official description though because he said it first). The shed is so big they struggle to get it onto the stage because a corner keeps getting caught on something. Manoeuvre, pivot, manoeuvre, pivot. A few minutes later it’s wheeled into the middle and the drummer climbs on top.

The band then do a two further songs before sacking the shed off and putting it back where they found it.

Was the shed some kind of protest? Probably not. Were the two songs that the band sung whilst it was there based around sheds? Did they sing ‘Sweet Shed of Mine’ and ‘My Love (How I Shed Those Tears For You)’? No they did not. Did the shed have anything to do with what was happening onstage? Not in the slightest.

It’s times like these that does make you wonder if anything actually makes sense anymore.

A new book thing

The highly technical online doohickey that lets you read our incredible books was already, of course, basically perfect. Nobody could deny that. But what if it could be more perfect?

As much as we all enjoy starting at the first page of an 80-page book and then repeatedly clicking “next” until we reach the page we want, sometimes, when we’re trying to find something specific, that process is not as quick or as direct as we’d like. What we need is a faster way of seeing what’s on all the pages so we can choose the one we’re looking for.

So I made that happen. Now you can go to any book (including the Mr Smiths) and click “page index”.

You’ll then be taken to thumbnails of all the pages. Clicking one will take you to the full page.

This improvement comes at no charge to you, and completes the latest upgrade to your increasingly brilliant life.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Remembering is fun