¶ Opening Chat
- Ben is in a green-lit techno-witch prison cell/recording studio at the Edinburgh festival. Could be Annie Lennox, The Proclaimers, Midge Ure, Rod Stewart (possibly) or Bannockburn Rogers (Rabbie Burns' hype man), who was in there the day before, stinking it out with Scotch egg stench. Scotch eggs aren't Scottish. The 'scotch' is from the same root as 'to scotch a rumour'. Bannockburn Rogers and the Bumhole Boys keep misjudging the times: in the 80s – fluffy and woke; in the 00s – Madonna conical boobs, followed by a rhombus codpiece. You can tell he's been in the studio by all the piss-filled ashtrays.
- Recording in mid-August so still in holiday mode. Breakfast ham update: Mike was in Slovenia where the breakfast ham scene was 'variable'. The Soča Valley had 'second to none' breakfast hams. The area around Lake Bled had a distracting breakfast scene because of the only other Brits being 'absolute pricks' about e.g. rotten (not actually rotten) pineapple. The hotel staff were able to counter-bollock because they were booked up so 'What are you going to do about it, baby? Get stuffed!'.
- Instant twatty read off the couple from Mike and his sister who just knew they were from Putney, which they were. Henry knows them: Colin & Sarah. Putney has a serious optics problem. The archetype is: entitled (Henry wrote this down before Mike said it), passive-aggressive, horse stuff in their house, gilets, taught/tight manner, will turn into Lady Bracknell. Beans listeners from Putney are probably fine though.
- Mike visited a room of pipes (64) in Castle Bled. Enough for a museum? There were wax figures of Ostrogoths (vibe: nice old time, farming, inventing cottage cheese, eating trout – good for weight loss).
- Mike sent Ben and Henry breakfast buffet photos from Ljubljana, including interesting meat pastes which were prion-heavy (might give you mad cow disease): anus and hoof. Mike's brain hoof is full goat.
- Mike crashed a van in Slovenia into a Czech man's car. Said man (Jakub) was very nice about it. Mike was nervous about the van rental place's reaction but the guy checking it over was a hungover 23-year-old man who had little interest and assumed everything was chinchilla. Mike had to come to an arrangement with Jakub, buying a year's supply of Czech cottage cheese but he was not interested in free tour show tickets (Ben hoped he might bring 100s of his family to the Glasgow date). Jakub's dad was a former member of the Czechoslovakian police force – is that a threat?
- Henry loves a 'man-to-man' solution, no need to trouble the suits. Just two moustachioed men, their moustachioed wives and children and secret police car with a rotating moustache on top to dispel any radar. The children notice that the car doesn't make those noises when Uncle Phil parks it. The men in the man-to-man solution need everything rolled up: sleeves, trouser legs, hems of T-shirts till they get to 'full Sporty Spice'.
- Ben would have been stressed because the other guy doesn't need to be nice, so during the wait for him Mike had to gauge whether he would be from the look of his car.
- Mike's wife was worried he'd be wearing his 'fun' rainbow sunglasses during negotiations. Mike shows them to Ben and Henry but they're now broken – did Jakub punch Mike in the face?
- Ben has a week's holiday coming up but hasn't decided on a destination. He is using a free flight that has depreciated in value since he didn't go to Brazil during the pandemic. Henry is confused about the timescale and thinks it's 2015, and has to be told about the Queen dying, but as long as Phillip Scofield is still broadcasting...
- Ben has a voucher to use from BA: the airline, not the character from The A-Team (Baracus Air?). BA only goes to high-end places, but flying to Vienna and back on the same day, though inconvenient and not fun, will still allow Bonjo to use the voucher. A spiteful holiday purely to prove that BA have not won.
- Puglia in Italy is on Ben's list. Henry and Mike both went there for a weddding. Bari is the place Ben fancies but it's somewhere you need to hire a car to get around, which is stressful and offputting. Mike always crashes the hire car in some way or ends up driving on the wrong side of the road in Crete.
- Ben's stingyness won't cough up for the extra insurance, and neither will Mike's brother-in-law, who hates to be upsold. Henry always sorts the insurance before the holiday: one of the few bits of adulting he has embraced. Mike is a 'dark brother-in-law' who is shit at doing the things they're supposed to do but is also a patsy so will be upsold to.
- Henry hates the stress of hiring a car though. Third parties (why does it always skip to third?), e.g. GloboTossers or Omnifuck, will trap you in a series of Kafkaesque phonecalls or direct you to a real human in a shipping crate on the outskirts. At that point, you'd be glad of a local Mafia boss to beat you up.
- Ben used to use Google Maps to find a hotel (ideally out the back of a donkey butcher) but don't put 'trustpilot' into Trustpilot, or you'll go back in time to the moment of your birth to review your mother's uterine opening, which Henry didn't have to do as he was delivered by Caesarean section (untimely ripped). Using a third-party E-Sleeperz type site via Google Maps gets you a hotel room next to a noisy lift (the problem room) as punishment for paying the least.
- Ben was in a hotel room in Poland once that was 40 degrees because 'it is the hot pipe'.
- Henry has been upgraded a couple of times because of the energy he gives off: 'we can shuffle things around for him'. This is the only way to get one over on capitalism.
- On a recent long-haul flight, Henry was in the extra-legroom, emergency exit seat. Panorama would do a special edition on this scenario. The screening should have been checking whether Henry could get the table out from within the armrest. Another test: what does he watch on the little telly? If it's Kung Fu Panda, he's off the plane.
- The teenagers next to Henry on the flight were watching The Breakfast Club. Ben suggests he should have told them he was Emilio Estevez. Perhaps Henry could then explain how he lost his hair due to the stress of working with Judd Nelson, and also put on weight and height. He could then pitch The Lunch Club using CG.
- Henry half remembers some short films made from Roald Dahl stories on this subject. Not The Twilight Zone. He tries to retell it but only remembers people driving along and someone being attacked, but no one is sure how this relates to his plane anecdote.
- The teenagers on the flight were in Legroom Normal while the parents were in First Class. They probably said 'You sit next to that man. I think it might be Emilio Estevez.' Is it okay to leave the teenagers in economy? First Class is too hedonistic for them.
- Ben has been upgraded, to premium economy. Perhaps his Habsburg passport's royal seals helped. The extra inch of space makes 100% difference.
- Henry's French car hire, a nice little Fiat, was fine, which isn't much good for an anecdote. He forgot to refill the tank and drove from Brittany to Hanover looking for petrol. Can you use AI to find a petrol station? Or a perimeter road? Or a brother-in-law?
¶ Topic Chat
- The Beans do the topic densely and efficiently because they have left themselves no time. Henry: noodles are extrapolated rice. Mike: a podcast he listened to said noodles might have come from Persia.
Kelly Vivanco's Show Art
¶ Emails
- Jacob (not Jakub) emails about the 'fox with human boobs' (the perfect creature) chat in the recent SparrowsEyes episode. He presents the bear from Mother Bear's Pizza in Bloomington, Indiana:
- Mike doesn't see a mama bear, more a student trying to make some cash on the weekend. Henry reminds Mike that bears reach sexual maturity between age 3 and 7. Is Henry's "I can imagine worse bears to hibernate with" the pizza place's motto? Henry gives us the illustrator's perspective: we're looking up at the shiny nose but down at the décolletage so is it a Frankenstein illustration? The cute bear from a kid's lunchbox + a pic from a squaddie's wall. Dough balls for the starter and no balls for desert thanks to the chemical castration offered if you look at this image too long. This refers to Henry's belief that chemical castration = dipping your scrotum into a beaker of acid.
- Caitlyn from western Massachusetts send in this photo of a ham salad:
- Mike wonders if the photo shows dried industrial adhesive or a turkey caught in the outer blast range of a thermonuclear bomb. Henry wonders if it shows Rodney's industrial viscera, made for horror films in the 70s (spleen, brain, face splattered across elevator door: you tell the story). It looks like 200 crabs' brains that have been sat on.
¶ Jingles
- Pompidou (3:15)
- Cured Meats of the Continent (3:54)
- Patsy (20:22)
- Bean Machine (49:17)
- Emails (50:07)
- A View From The Illustrator's Chair (53:58)
- Breakfast Hams (57:35)
- Patreon (1:00:20)
¶ Sean Bean Lounge
- The Revenge of Brian Ferry (24 patrons)
¶ Listener Theme Tune
- Chris sends in an homage to the TV show The Professionals. He does a switcheroo about two young firebrands and wizened leader.
¶ Notable Quotes
- That went down like a bucket of sick.
- The music industry isn't like an owl's head. You can't keep twisting.
- Mike Wozniak's Ostrogoth Diet!
- You might as well put an anus and a hoof in the middle of your brain, then see how you get on with the sudoku.
- I'm going to take a sick bag and I'll eat the contents of it.
- You're the arse indentation a brother-in-law makes in a sofa.
- Who trusts the Trustpilot?
- Uncle Phil, the security geese have seen me!
- You have the imagination; he has the viscera.