¶ Opening Chat
- Henry's fan needs to be turned off but he was hoping Ben wouldn't notice, like people in the countryside don't notice the relentless smell of turds (from toads to ramblers). Ben notices fridges being on so he has to keep foods in an ice house or salt them.
- Henry turns it off, but now can only hear the boiling hot silence.
- Mike tells a tale to make Henry feel better: his neighbour Bob (of Bob and Ruth) was playing with his children in the garden when he found a half-eaten baby bird, so he concealed the hemi-corpse in the food waste bin in their shared bin alley. Mike found the alley the next morning teeming with maggots. No "i" or "eye" in "teeming with maggots" (except there is), just an all-consuming mouth and a will to survive/fly into a window.
- Maggots appear like THAT at this time of year, e.g. if you leave an onion on a windowsill as a signal to a sexy onion farmer.
- Ben's neighbours bin a lot of turds (baby + dog + cat) producing an audible hum that Ben can sense as a sound ("turd, turd, turd, turd" in a Sharks and Jets, West Side Story style with finger-clicking). What's the etiquette? They are probably well aware and desperate for the bin lorry to come. A case of hard cheese: parmesans, pecorinos – grate them over to fight smell with smell.
- Henry lived above a high-turd household (baby + cat) and every summer was Hot Turd Summer (possible T-shirt for the merch shop: https://threebeansaladshop.com/, available in Brown and Ill Beige). Henry moved from hard cheeses to medium (wensleydale, red leicester). Their bin would be suppurating/thronging/pulsating with urban, shit-covered rabbits. Early nappies are okay but once weaned from breastmilk onto soft hot dogs (the meat closest to breastmilk) the nappies become rank. Weaning process involves draping the breasts with hams, scotch egg in the cleavage, wedging mince under the armpits, or slathering on a meat paste (very modern), but people don't like the baby's grandparents telling them how to do things.
- Ben had been away for a week and came back to a broken boiler at a time when heat isn't – but showers are – necessary, so had a cold shower, which was horrible and not a Wim Hof vitality experience. No 'Bim Pof' rebranding (misheard as Bin Pof, who jumps straight into bins full of turds).
- Henry sees the cold-water evangelists as examples of humanity being pathetic and reaching for something counter-intuitive ("Stick a shoe in your mouth!") for an adrenaline survival surge.
- Ben texted his boiler service guy at 1:30am (Henry: "out of order as a thing to do") and he replied at 5:40am (possibly a revenge text). Henry sees boiler service guys as untrustworthy in their communication, as whenever they say they'll come, they're actually sitting at home watching repeats of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Ben was awake for a piss when the text came in at 5:40, suggesting the boiler man was watching him from inside his bed. Boiler man came round at 7am, fixed the boiler and went stright to the airport to be best man at a stag do.
- Henry reverse-lobstered himself to cold but didn't shock his body enough to have any tech startup ideas. His breathing style in the cold shower told him it was a bad idea, so he'd go straight to hot lobster again, with a pat of butter and a sprig of fennel.
- Henry at the after-spinning class showers: frosted glass shower doors give a Bond-intro silhouette (Henry sings "You Only Live Twice" theme but with "There's a weird-shaped bald man" lyrics). Henry's shower has to be hot, hot, hot (Mike prefers cool) as this is his 'treat' after exercise, so he uses barbecue charcoal to heat things up, which the staff assume is them having a stroke when they smell it. Henry will wait for a super-hot "nice time" shower to be available, moving between cubicles.
¶ Topic Chat
- Old Wives' Tales: sexist and ageist phrase, so within the Beans' comfort zone.
- If you don't wear a scarf, you'll acquire a viral infection or become confused in April/May or October/November. Are old wives' tales now conspiracy theories ("measles was made up by the government")?
- Horror film "Keep Your Face Like That When The Wind Changes And You Won't Be Able To Stop Your Face Being Like That" opens with "That's just an old wives' tale". Henry worried that might happen as a kid but Mike didn't because he doesn't have an imagination (his greatest strength).
- Feed a cold, starve a fever: with chicken soup? Henry had bad food poisoning and craved plain soup so bought some tonkotsu but it was a pork broth that was creamy, not clear. Not dairy creamy, but internal pork cream from boiling bones.
- Eating carrots helps you see in the dark: Correct, because of Vitamin A. Henry thought holding the carrot in a dark place would cause it to glow like Bilbo Baggins's sword, but he must have had defective carrots as even sticking AAA batteries up them didn't work.
- If you cut your hair, it'll grow back thicker: is this like 'if you don't wash your hair, it begins to clean itself'? Mike had a teacher who believed that: Greasy Dave (also incredibly creepy). Longer you hold onto that belief, the harder it is to let go (like holding a hot-air balloon rope). Hair parting wretched with maggots.
- Henry believes in the human body's natural oils being supressed by the beauty industry. Science from Henry about oil and soap and their carbon molecules (the confusion is suds). Henry only just started washing his face. A brown waterfall of grime comes off his face thanks to living in London (and a pigeon out of his ear, with internal pork cream coming out every time he wrings out a finger). In the gap between skin and body oils, the beauty industry has founded a multi-billion dollar industry.
- Ben never uses lip balm because you only need it if you start using it. Henry has a home lip balm and a transport lip balm. He shares his Nivea stick (so intimate). Your lips come to expect the balm.
- "Caveman days" is a specious argument because they were rubbish (lived for 12 minutes, had to have 80 children to continue population level, their art/arses was/were shit, rubbish tusked donkeys on cave walls). Henry suggests Ben record the podcast using caveman technology, which is possible (have you seen The Flintstones?). "But what about the Nazis?" is the other specious argument (no one ever says "But what about the LibDems?").
- Feet develop a natural callus, even Henry's, whose fungal foot problem is no worse than the rest of the population (Mike fears this is true). That callus is the shoe of the body so you shouldn't scrape off the hard stuff. Supposed to be hooved so that we can kick the shit out of a woolly mammoth.
- We have developed technology – shoes, clothes, moisturiser, car insurance, vaccines, voting, Travelodges, human rights legislation, towels – that has turned us soft. Cavemen didn't have epaulettes or espadrilles but their infant mortality rates were hovering around the 100% level.
- Big corporations monetise the stuff we naturally have – Conde Nast, Johnson & Johnson, Dr Martens, Admiral Insurance, Hovis. It's interesting that, isn't it though? Joe Rogan would get Mel Gibson & RFK on to talk about this stuff.
Kelly Vivanco's Show Art
¶ Emails
Loads of moth mail:
- Morgan from Wigan has a Terrifying Moth Disaster (TMD) email about a hawk moth (size of a pigeon) invasion of their home. Morgan and household yielded territory. In the morning they attacked it with half a can of Raid and then smashed it to death with a mallet (the one chink in its armour).
- Amy came back to the living room after visiting the toilet and found a moth between her leg and trouser. Her thighs must have shone brighter than the lightbulb in the toilet (only British people have thighs that are whiter than the Moon). Upon ripping off her trousers, a moth the size of a dog flew out. Henry's ultimate horror with an insect is (1) for it to ask if he has really made the most of his education and (2) for it to fly betwixt clothing and flesh. These horrors play out in the wee hours when all the insect wants to do is reproduce or pollinate (depending on what grotesque phase it is in). Horror film: The Day Moth (starring Anthony Hopkins as the trousers).
- Emma had a moth get between her eye and glasses lens one evening. Henry is horrified and takes his glasses off ("That's the sacred portal, you can't go in there"). He doesn't like things near his eyes, e.g. snooker cues or the tip of a javelin. The moth thrashed its life away next to Emma's conjunctiva ("Of course it's thrashing. That's all it knows."). Henry would make a random noise and throw whatever is in his hand away (remote control, glass of wine, his date, treasured aunt, the William Tyndale Bible). Henry briefly had a wonderful spring in Paris with a moth (cheap dates happy to share a tiramisu and follow you home if you have a Maglite).
- John/Jon's 'undead butterflies' email about swatting a moth and it vanishing into a plume of grey dust with no moist organ tissue. People more concerned with Keir Starmer and potholes. John/Jon is asking dangerous questions, he'll be swarmed by moths who will take him away in the night.
- Genre of email that needs a jingle (DigiBangers): listeners who have injured their hands while listening. Alex the blacksmith has, like an episode of Casualty, so many things that could go wrong: forge, sparks, steel, hammer, anvil, letter stamp, blade of a kitchen knife. Alex missed their strike while laughing at Mike tripping over a drum kit and picked up a white-hot letter stamp, so now has 'P' seared into their thumb. P for Pakerdonia! Alex is now a prophet and being a blacksmith gives premium optics.
¶ Jingles
- Henry's Beefcake Journey (16:11)
- Tom's dark, theremin-waveform Bean Machine jingle that sounds like a BBC 70s sci-fi theme ("Sector Five") that would have given children nightmares but when watched now is just a man dressed as a sausage with a yogurt pot on his head. A Shakespearian actor, Sir Derek Troughton, would have paid for his house in Hampstead by appearing as Omniflax 9 for one week, being pushed along a beach in Brighton on a drinks trolley, before going off to rehearsals for The Trojan Women. (20:12)
- The Glamorous London Life of Henry Paker (31:27)
- Jo/Joe's 90s dance Email jingle – Henry likes the background 'oh-ah' vocals ('toplines' recorded separately to pick off the shelf, like Mike's hog noises) and Mike is reminded of The Shamen. The Wozniak Hog Library includes 'hog looks out over the WWI war graves in Northern France', 'terrified hog about to be dropped off the back of an RAF bomber' (this one wakes up Pam) and 'sow just found out what happens at the end of The Sixth Sense' – £499.99 per month for access to the catalogue from the hog noise library. The app is free but it's just a photo of Mike's body + a hog's head. (39:28)
- Patreon (56:23)
¶ Notable Quotes
- Turn your fan off, Henry.
- We've really gone hot and gross today.
- Zero turds binned here since 2022.
- There's an idea: a dancing turd with opposable thumbs.
- If you become a cold-water evangelist, I'm leaving this pod now.
- You cannot pop every bubble on my hot donkey, Omniflax!
- The opposite of oil is soap.
- Your armpits will be writhing with rat babes.
- We feel like quite a fungal country.
- We are ungulates by any other name.
- What a strange thing to say.
¶ Sean Bean Lounge
- Early morning at the annual 'Should We Rethink The Flooring' debate (42 patrons)
¶ Listener Theme Tune
- Scott's Playdate console version as a nice lullaby for anyone still awake (he's also working on a Jools Holland vs Partridge Boogie Beanwoogie Smashfuck version).