Hey everyone, it’s time to sing a song. A lovely song with lovely lyrics where everyone can have a great time, like those classic songs of the 1940s about losing your watch down a sewer grate or looking for milk in all the wrong shops.
This is a song about purchasing a fake gorilla.
“I want you all to know, I want you see to see,
What this terrible absence is doing to me.
I need to find something special for my garden,
I need to find something brash, oh, beg your pardon.
I wandered round and round, ’til I finally found
Something deeply profound.”
“There it was, sitting, waiting for my presence,
There it was between foxes, hares and pheasants.
Animal jumble bumble, humble though I was,
I was thoroughly pleased until I saw the cost.”
Wait, wait, stop the song.
Thirteen hundred pounds? For a gigantic plastic gorilla? What kind of insanity is this? I can’t afford that. No wonder there’s a thin layer of dust all over its back; it’s because nobody wants to splurge that much on something so decidedly useless.
I’m sorry, everyone. I promised you a heartfelt song and what I delivered was gorilla vitriol. You’ll have to find your good cheer and mirth elsewhere.
When you think of Christmas what immediately comes to mind? Decorations? Presents? Singing carols on the doorstops of strangers for fun to bring back the festive cheer to everyone?
Yeah, me too.
What doesn’t come to mind is any of this.
When looking for a Christmas tree a few weeks ago, I found these monstrosities dotted around a garden centre.
Why are they all playing the saxophone? Why do they all look like they’ve been drugged at the office Christmas party? When did they all have time to learn how to play an instrument? Why would anyone pay £19.99 for a single saxophone-playing Christmas toy?
I don’t know, but what I do know is that if you’re looking to make your house a little more festive then this is not the way to do it. Once you start mixing jazz and Christmas then you’re staring down the barrel of a Kenny G album.
Welcome back to the Melocaeruledus zone. This time we take a deep dive (literally) into the aquatic regions of the Fladger family tree with the Nautical Fladger…
Nautical Fladger
Scientific Name:Melocaeruledus pelagornis (pelagornis = “of the open sea”, befitting its aquatic and wide ranging habitats) Common Names: The Nautical Fladger, The Sea Bastard, The Pinchy Fizzer.
Habitat: Rocky shores, tidal caves, open seas.
Description: This maritime variant retains the shimmering blue-green fly arse of its kin, but its forelegs have evolved into lobster-like claws suited for cracking shellfish and prising molluscs from rocks. Its wings, encrusted with salt, serve as stabilisers in water as well as for brief buzzing flights between tidal pools, reefs and stranded boats.
Behaviour: It is fiercely territorial around rich feeding grounds and is known to follow fishing vessels, stealing bait and offal when it thinks nobody is looking. When threatened, it retreats to coastal caves, clinging upside-down to damp stone while emitting a low, rattling buzz to ward off intruders.
Notes: The Nautical Fladger is more often heard than seen—its eerie trilling cry echoing across misty harbours.
It’s been a while since the Pouring Beans magazine ran a puzzle page, so for all those of you sitting on a railway platform with a pencil and ten minutes to spare, here’s this week’s fun games.
All you have to do is identify the common Beans catchphrases from the symbols.
Answers on a postcard to the usual address. The winner will be randomly selected and will win a specially branded box of Pouring Beans “After Eight” minty beans. Good luck!
On Thursday, at work, I spent the day installing some new equipment as part of a project we’re doing. The desks in our control room are full of ancient PCs that are long overdue for replacement and we’re now, finally, replacing them with new stuff. That means taking the old PCs out, untangling all the existing cables so they can be removed, and then running new cables to all the screens and stuff.
It takes about four hours to do a single desk if everything goes to plan, and at the end of it you have cuts and grazes all over your hands and your arms from the cable ties and the metalwork and the unexpected encounters with sharp corners as you rummage about.
One of the desks I did on Thursday four screens, plus one more that had been there for years but hadn’t got a PC attached to it. It was always meant to get a PC to support some other new stuff we’re installing which is why I’d put it there all those years ago. Thursday was the day it finally got wired up to something.
I ran a new video cable for it easily enough, but then I had to connect the touchscreen. The USB cable came out of the back of the screen, ran neatly down the monitor arm, and then vanished into the desk. Inside the desk was a rat’s nest of a million identical cables. I looked at this and then said some swear words.
Then I looked in the pod where the PCs live, because that’s where the cable would have to end up, and in there was a trailing USB cable. Attached to the cable was a green paper label. Written on the green paper label, in my handwriting, were the words “touchscreen USB for 5th PC”.
Thanks, Past Chris. You’re an absolute legend.
That would be enough good deeds, you’d think, but he did it again.
Just now I thought I’d better make a start on the Pouring Beans Calendar 2026. I opened the Pouring Beans folder on my laptop, and inside that I opened the Projects folder. (Kev may want to take notes on this example of a useful filing system for his work on the podcast.) I was going to make a new folder in there called Calendar 2026, but there already was one. That’s strange.
I opened it. Inside it I found this.
And when I opened that folder, I found this.
Inside those folders are 240 photographs, which are an extremely welcome sight when I have 315 blank calendar pages to fill.
He’s only bloody gone and done it again.
Thanks, Past Chris. If I ever get to use a time machine I’ll come back and return the favour.
