Category: Remembering is fun

Avatar Fracking History: the Georgians

Hello and welcome to another edition of Fracking History, the top-rated infotainment docuhistoriography show here on Beans TV.

In this week’s episode, we’re going to be seeing what we can learn about the Georgians. We begin by drilling vertically downwards some 212 metres into the past, and then turn the drill head horizontally to push through a layer of sediment composed mainly of the late Qing Dynasty until we locate a rich seam of Georgian history.

Our loud, highly destructive machinery now begins pumping a mixture of water, sand and polyacrylamide into history at extremely high pressure. The delay while we wait for results is extremely tense, with our resident geophysical historian, Dr. Cornward Habsburg, nervously checking over his valves and dials. Eventually a thin, dark-coloured liquid begins seeping from the outlet valve, and we have our very first sample of the Georgian era.

What does it tell us about the aristocracy and the ordinary people of Britain in the eighteenth century?

Dr. Habsburg adds a few drops of hydrochloric acid to a sample of the liquid and places it in a centrifuge at a controlled temperature of 76° celsius. The resulting dark residue is then inspected under a microscope.

It reveals Georgian society in all its debauched, vulgar glory. The presence of particularly high levels of carbon nitrates can only be a result of the deeply unpopular Prince Regent openly enjoying affairs with a number of high society women and the early development of the gutter press in the form of short pamphlets and magazines printing salacious gossip.

It’s been a fascinating journey to an important point in Britain’s history and has brought to rich, vivid life a chapter of the past that can be so difficult to accurately reconstruct today. But all good things must come to an end. Join us next time on Fracking History when we’ll be using the latest hydraulic hammer drilling technology to break through a seam of solid, compacted Dark Ages to begin extracting parts of the early Roman era. Until then, goodbye.

Avatar Positive Moments

I know there’s been a lot of bad things happening recently. Just today I discovered that the patent on application number EP96923892.2 expired on 21 June. Very, very sad times.

It can’t be all doom and gloom though, right? There has to be some bright cheeks peeking out between the hazard clouds. It’s a good job that I am here to wheel out the happy high fives.

In addition to the thrilling news that my new book, ‘Thirst Pocket Hysteria; a Nation in Crisis’, which deals with the sudden outbreak of panic amongst the general public due to the baffling rise of the Vanish Tip Exchange and people bulk-buying kitchen roll at an alarming rate, available at all general and local book stores come this Friday, is out, I also have a story which will warm the very deepest and very murkiest corners of your hearts.

Those with a keen mind will remember that my very first post on the then new look Beans on 3rd February 2014 dealt with a mild irritation concerning a lollipop man who works near my office. If you can’t remember it then it is also here like a tasty mung bean salad. He clearly could not handle how great I was, and still am, and chose to deal with this by being quietly hostile, ignoring my attempts to break the ice. A period of two years elapsed with no further instances until a couple of months ago I crossed the road and in reaching the other side he finally spoke up with, “Good Morning.”

I was stunned. All this time and now he chose to speak up? A lessor man would scoff and walk on, but there was something in his approach which made me re-consider my choices. The conflict was over. The battle was done. I dusted off the dour days go by, held my head up and retorted with an equally chipper, “Good Morning!” Now it happens each time I cross the road at his crossing. He sometimes even smiles. We are the best of fake office grunt and lollipop man friends.

I am still a little confused as to why the council would pay a man to stand next to a pelican crossing and help people cross the road where an automated system has been put in place for that very reason… but hey, that is not my beef.

This has been Positive Moments for the Beans Network. If you would like to share your positive moments with us then please don’t.

And now back to Chris…

Avatar What did you just say about beavers?

Reuben approached me last weekend because he had recently had a dream that had perplexed him and needed to know what it meant.

This is mostly his dream with details but with a smudge of embellishment on my part:

“Reuben is walking around school with his new fictional best friend, Daniel. They had decided to walk back home through the woods once the school day was over. The woods, though dark, were still light enough to be unthreatening. They had gone halfway through when they heard a strange noise and a bright blue flash, and stood at the base of a tree was a beaver.

They tried to get near but each time the beaver disappeared and reappeared in a different part of the woods. Sometimes the beaver would appear in different attire, and in particular as a Mexican. Reuben and Daniel split up and in doing so, one of them managed to grab the beaver. As the other approached, the bright blue light flashed and they had magically been transported to ancient Egypt.

It was at this point they realised it was a magical, time-travelling beaver.

The animal was tired; time-travelling is a very tiring experience. The only way to re-charge the beaver was to feed him a particular type of wood. Once this was done, Reuben and Daniel had to try to convince the beaver that they needed to go home, which was difficult because the beaver was worshipped as a God in this period of history.

After a fair amount of tussling, the beaver accidentally transports them to the post apocalyptic world of 2704. Then, through a series of mishaps, they also take in the sights of the Jurassic era, the Romans, pirates, Aztecs, Victorian era Britain, World War II and the 1980’s.

Eventually though they get home and decide to keep the beaver as a pet. It turns out he is called Harold. His full name is Harold “Carrot” Bevoid. In his time he drives a Beaver Delorean. His time is not specifically mentioned so they do not know what year he has time-travelled from.”

…

Something to do with puberty perhaps?

Avatar Remembering is Fun – ‘Kevin’s Favourite Song’

Due to a distinct absence of Kevin and Kevin-based products it now falls upon Chris and myself to fill in the blanks. I’m not very good at grooming poodles or doing up houses so this will be a lengthy and painful process.

I’m also really rank at doing IT. I did an IT once and the whole office didn’t recover for six weeks. I don’t get to do an IT anymore.

Instead let’s hark back to a time before all of this guff. A more simple time when I would spend most weekends levelling up my characters on ‘Secret of Mana’ on the SNES and crying about girls, or a lack thereof. Kevin, meanwhile, was off living it up big style. Not only had he managed to do his face in on a holiday to Greece with Tom Cruise lookalike and badger enthusiast Mr T Matthews, but he also was holding down a sweet job in Monkey Maze and beating up crims as his crime fighting alter ego, The Malevolent Pen.

With all of this going on you’d think he wouldn’t had had time to keep up with the latest fashions, the hottest beats, the sweetest sounds. Well you’d be wrong. Many a time did I go round to his house to find him pulling shapes to THE song of 2002:

He played it constantly. This was his jam and nobody else’s, and if they tried to make it their jam he threw them into a canal. I saw him do it; it was brutal.

There was a time where each time I would call him he’d be sat in a car outside DJ Luck and MC Neat’s recording studio in the hope of catching them and getting them to sign his test vinyl pressing of the song.

I know there will be a large pool of people who won’t believe this because after his endless posts about Status Quo it’s hard to imagine him not wearing a pair of jeans and a ponytail and being chased around by a shit Simon Pegg double. Yet, with my hand on my heart and my leg in the furnace, I can tell no lie.

I wonder if he still plays it now, in the dark, quietly, as his child sleeps. One day Tiny Mountain might wake up as the sun gently caresses his face and he’ll turn to Kevin and his first word will be, “Irie!”

I hope so, guys, I really hope so.