Cooking new beans

So, here’s a thing that just happened.

I logged in to the Beans and there were lots of updates pending, and because I’m a helpful sort of chap, I said yes, let’s run those updates. The updates have installed WordPress 5.0.2.

You may or may not care about that, and certainly when it finished doing its clever whizbottery I was, at best, nonplussed. But it turns out that one of the things that has changed is the editor where you write new posts. It is different. It is more different than anything you’ve ever seen. Right now, while you’re reading this, you don’t believe me, and you’re thinking that it’s just a box where you type stuff and it can’t be that different.

But you’re wrong.

It’s so different.

There isn’t even a box.

If you want to figure out how to make it do stuff, there are some words here that will explain things. I bequeath you this important document to assist you on your journey of discovery.

Good luck, comrades. Good luck as we march onwards, to face our destiny, toward the brave new beans of 2019.

Potato Nostalgia

Around this time of year a lot of people get nostalgic. They remember years gone by, people who have left us and happy memories sitting next to your toxic gas fire, using the flames to make toast, rather than getting up and using the grill, like the little fat bastard you are (or I was).

Whilst I was rummaging around in some old papers I came across this little gem:

A single tear flew from my eyelid and hit the ground, no doubt causing a tsunami half a world away.

Pots Tatoas were my very convoluted and confusing way of asking Chris if he wanted to get a baked potato for lunch way, way, way back in the dim and distant past when we both worked in Leeds city centre.

Sadly we all missed Pots Tatoas Day this year but I hope that everyone puts it in their diary so we can rally round and stoke the oven (?) in time to enjoy its merits next year.

Healthy eating

Christmas is over and we’ve all eaten a bit too much. Too many roast potatoes*. Too many chocolates. Too much cake.

What you need is something healthy. Something full of nutrition. Something light and fresh. And thankfully, I have just the thing. Presenting the Pouring Beans 2018 Burger and Salad Special, a meal that superficially looks like burger and chips but which cunningly includes a generous helping of lush, healthy greenery. Enjoy!

Salad (with burger and chips on the side)

* I’m being silly, of course. There is no such thing as too many roast potatoes.

Pre-Birth Certificate

BEHOLD!

As promised, please see the premier pre-birth certificate for Mr Menendez and his lovely wife’s new child, expected soon.

Four Word Reviews: ‘Til Their Eyes Shine

I started these reviews when I got sent a Wang Chung album as a joke, and Kev and Sarah had just reviewed a Papples album in this format, and I thought it was a fun thing to do with a CD I’d been sent. Then more CDs started arriving. But I never thought we’d end up here. The CDs that arrived were just crap albums, and I would write reviews of how amusingly bad they were. Until now. Now I’ve been sent… I mean, what is this? It’s called “‘Til Their Eyes Shine: The Lullaby Album”. It’s a 1992 charity compilation of slow, snoozy numbers by female artists that will supposedly put a child to sleep, though for my taste half are too lively for that and the rest are too disturbing.

Am I being punished, somehow? Is this horrendous mush the price I pay for some indiscretion I committed? I don’t know. I just know it was awful.

Tom’s Sausage Lion

“What is this?” you may ask yourself, whilst sitting next to a roaring fire with a brandy in the your hand. I know that this is the way that Chris normally spends his evening and, thus, I assume everyone does the same. What you are staring at is a book, one of those things with words in that people store on shelves to look intelligent. It’s a book by a man and it was written some time ago. You can tell that because the picture on the front looks like it was from the 1970’s (although according to Wikipedia it was written in 1986).

Now it’s not that it is a bad story. It’s a very short story and interesting enough to keep your attention for the hour or so you will spend reading it. It is, however, not worth reading a second time. Here’s the plot:

Tom is a boy. One evening he comes across a lion eating sausages in his back garden. Nobody believes him (a la The Boy who Cried Wolf) and so he tries to track the lion down so that he can prove everyone, including his parents, his peers and the teachers at his school, that he is telling the truth. The lengths that Tom goes to to prove this are quite remarkable; in this most modern of nows right now, as in now 2018, he would have given up and gone back to playing Puzzle Blox or whatever bollocks was currently trending at the time on his I-Pad. That said, the ending is pretty flaccid. Despite what a comment on the back of the book says (hilariously “the climax is breathtaking!”) he finds the lion, parades it around in front of everyone to show he isn’t a liar and then the owner turns up to take it back. That’s it, about seventy odd pages. It is a kid’s book so nobody expected it to be the length of ‘The Stand’ by Stephen King.

The reason Kev bought it for me was due to the ridiculous title. It would be easy to think that it was some kind of porno without the picture of the child trying to entice a lion, tucking away on a string of sausages. I read this while I was donating platelets at the blood clinic. The nurse who was keeping an eye on me couldn’t believe that such a book did exist and, as I pointed out to her also, I did not know it existed until it arrived in a padded envelope through my front door.

Would I recommend it? No. Would I read it again? No. Would I say it’s a bad book? No. I give it a hearty two stars out of five; it loses a third star for not including a lion made of sausages. The title is very misleading. One of these days I may write a book called Tom’s Sausage Lion which will include a lion made of sausages. It’s a work in progress.

How to use a cash machine

Many of us Millennials (I think we’re Millennials, are we Millennials?) have trouble using old-fashioned things. We do everything digitally now. Personally I get all my sleep done using an app and I have a monthly subscription that delivers all my food through my Smart TV. So it can be a bit of a challenge for us Millennials (Jesus I think we actually might be Millennials) to get to grips with the analogue world.

Old people and market stall traders use “money” in place of digital bank transfers and contactless payments. If you need some “money” you can get it from a cash machine. They can be bewildering if you’re under the age of 60, but don’t worry, they’re quite easy to use once you know how.

Here’s the correct procedure.

Locate a cash machine. It will look like a sort of retro 80s video game machine embedded in the wall of a bank.
Familiarise yourself with the layout of the machine. Designs can vary but they will all have some common features: a screen with control buttons down each side; a numeric keypad; a heavily fortified metal letterbox; and a little slot with a flashing green light.
Insert your contactless bank card into the flashing slot. The machine is old and needs to actually make contact with it, but will give it back later.
Look at the screen. It will usually ask you to wait, because it’s old. Eventually you’ll be asked for your PIN number. Try to remember this. It’s what you had to use before you had a contactless bank card.
The screen will now ask you how much “money” you want and whether you want a receipt. Use the buttons next to the screen to appease its desire for information.
A beeping noise will announce the return of your contactless bank card. Retrieve it from the slot when it is slowly regurgitated.
The machine will now make whirring noises and, after an interval, the quantity of “money” you requested will be thrust out of the fortified letterbox.
You need to still be standing at the machine if you want to actually claim this money. If you have absent-mindedly walked away as soon as your card is extruded, you will not get the money.
If you stupidly walk away before the money appears, you will hear a loud beeping sound coming from the cash machine as you walk away, and you will spend a few seconds thinking it sounds like the sort of beeping sound a cash machine makes, and wondering why a cash machine might be making a noise like that.
You will only realise when the beeping noise stops that it’s the sound of a cash machine trying to tell you you’ve got it to dispense some of your hard earned cash, £30 to be precise, and then idiotically absconded before the cash dispensing happened, leaving thirty of your precious sheets wafting in the breeze in a crowded shopping street.
As the horror of your stupid, moronic actions finally dawn on you, you will turn around, just in time to see your thirty quid being removed from the machine by some middle aged woman whose face is a picture of nefarious glee, scarcely able to believe her luck that some brainless fool has just put three shiny tenners in her hand.
You begin to run back to the cash machine, but the crowd of shoppers slows you down, you can’t get through, and meanwhile the woman has melted into the crowd, anonymous in a black coat in a sea of black coats, a bit shorter than average, lost below the heads and hats, and – probably wary of the fact that whoever just used the cash machine can only be a few paces away – is more than likely now darting for cover to make a getaway. She could have gone down a narrow alley on the left, or into one of the shops.
By the time you get to the cash machine, she’s gone, and you’re £30 down, you absolute tool.
You absolute tool.

Unexpected

I was at someone’s leaving do last night.

I’ve only been in this job a little while so I don’t know him very well, but a works leaving do is a thing everyone goes to regardless of who it is or how well they know them. You turn up and have a drink and laugh about people you work with who are currently out of earshot at the other side of the bar, and then at some point you get 30 seconds with the actual person who’s leaving so you can say things like “good luck” and “it’s been really great working with you”. You know how it is.

At about 11, not long before he left, I bumped into Jon (who is leaving) and got 30 seconds with him before he was whisked away by someone else. “Good luck”, I said. “It’s been really great working with you”.

The normal thing at this point is for the person who is leaving to say something like “yeah, you too” and “I’ll probably see you again at someone else’s leaving do before long”, and then you laugh heartily, and then your 30 seconds are up.

That’s why I was very surprised when Jon went completely off script and said “keep writing those Mr Smith books, they’re fucking hilarious. You’ll have to send me the next one if you do any more.”

I didn’t have a reply ready for this highly improbable situation, so I floundered for a moment without knowing what to say, and then my 30 seconds were up and he was whisked away to another little group of people, waving and enthusiastically thumbs-upping me as he went. Presumably it was their turn to say “good luck” and “it’s been really great working with you”.

I doubt any of them had ever read the adventures of Mr Smith. But then, I didn’t think Jon had, so maybe they had. Maybe everyone has. I don’t really know what to expect any more.