Bionic Beans

Nearly a week after Hugh Grant allegedly assaulted a member of the paparazzi with a tub of baked beans, the incident is still being pored over by newspapers from Croatia to Karachi. It has featured prominently in the US and UK from tabloid spreads to op-ed pieces. It is even the subject of various online spoofs (including datelinehollywood.com's "Bean Farmers Burning Hugh Grant in Effigy").

“When you pick up a can of baked beans, you have a responsibility to understand the culture where it came from,” said Brazilian bean farmer Alejandro Cunha, just after he set fire to a giant “Music and Lyrics” poster. “This is worse than if he had spit in our faces. Or forced us all to watch ‘American Dreamz’ ten times in a row.”

In Brazil, the world’s leading producer of beans, a warrant has been issued for Grant’s arrest.

“Hugh Grant has offended the Brazilian people and bean farmers around the world,” said Brazil’s minister of beans Silas Costa. “We demand that the United Kingdom extradite him so that he can face justice.”

Personally I blame the beans. Just what were the "alleged beans" doing in a plastic box? Do the rich get them packaged differently? Have celebrities been quietly informed that tin is carcinogenic while the rest of us are left in ignorance lest the tomato and haricot markets collapse? If, as some reports have suggested, they were in a Tupperware container, are we to assume that Grant is either secretly poor, or cultivating a Howard Hughes-ish thrift that points to him turning gloatingly through his bank statements with filthy six-inch fingernails in a pile of his own filth?