Month: July 2004

Neal’s Belch no. 147 for 23rd Jul, 2004

Ten years ago to this day, the very first ever steam train passed through my home town. It was a momentous day.

We all lined the streets to wave as it made it’s way to the junk yard to get scrapped. And a proud day it was, too. Our scrap yard is one of the best in the world. We destroy things like there’s no tomorrow, reducing them to tiny pellets of dense metal in minutes. Anyway, right next door to the scrap yard, is the canal.

And a while back I was sitting at the canal bank, waiting to speak to somebody about a personal loan, when I noticed that the sign showing the name of the shop across the road was missing three letters.

Obviously I have no idea which letters they were, and the only chance I had of finding out was if I raided the bins at the back of the shop and found some headed stationery belonging to the store, so that I could see what it was called.

Unfortunately the bins are kept in a dark alley to the rear of the building, and  the laneway is shared with a large hotel and bar. While walking along the alley I was startled by the sudden sound of glass being smashed as it was dropped into a recycling bin. I got such a fright that I leapt over a wall and found myself in the back garden of a respected criminologist, who, it transpired, was already investigating the signs thing, and had it all under control.

So my work there was done.

I was superfluous to the situation, no longer needed, cast onto the steaming molehill of life like a badly formed metaphor that should have featured a dunghill intead of a molehill.

With hindsight though, it’s probably all for the best.

I am neither qualified nor sufficiently experienced to competently investigate the disappearance of three letters from a shop sign. The best theory I could come up with was that they were stolen by an ungerground letters agent who sold them on the black market to the producers of Sesame Street. Obviously that theory falls apart immediately when you remember that Sesame street is usually sponsored by two letters and a number, not three letters.

Anyway two cats walk into a bar.

The first cat immediately walks out again and stages a flamboyant, though ultimately unsuccessful demonstration against the stereotyping of cats as habitual bar visitors.

The other cat is a little more chilled out, and takes the longer view of the situation. He realises that by making them pay him regular sums of money to appear in barcat stories, he will, over time, slowly drain the perpretators of all their funds until eventually they have to stop creating barcat stories for good.

The second cat has a lovely night and gets drunk but not too drunk and they all live happily ever after.

Well, he did, anyway.

The other cat spent the rest of his life wishing he had stayed in the pub that night and not put himself up for ridicule and disrespect.in the national newspapers.

The only glimmer of hope he had was that the people who cut his picture out of the papers to hang up on their walls, would notice that the Sunday colour episode of Dilbert, on the other side of the page, was particularly funny that day so they might hang it up the other way around, to brighten up their homes.

Unfortunately that day’s episode was one of the clever but obscure ones about some sort of computer issue, that nobody ever understands. So the cat was out of luck.

Ironically he was a black cat, and on his way home that night he crossed the paths of at least seventeen lucky people and unwittingly changed their lives for the better.

Not that he cared.

All he wanted was a saucer of milk and a ball of string to play with and maybe the company of his friend, the second cat, who was down in the pub enjoying himself. It’s a dog’s life, being a cat.

Neal’s Belch no. 145 for 16th Jul, 2004

Some time ago I went out to buy some butterflies as I normally do when going fly fishing. They make excellent bait and I’ve caugt quite a lot of flies. But this time I decided for a change to go for one of the margarine ones. In my day we used to have raw flies without anything on them, and we were grafeful for it.

But it was always a problem of course because the zip kept opening.

Margarine is supposedly much better for you than butter. But then on the other hand, margarine is, as I believe the young people say, “mank”. Nowadays of course the young hip trendy kids have buttons on their pants instead.of flies.

Anyway, as I was sweeping my hand through the supermarket’s dairy cabinet, trying to catch a Margarine fly, I suddenly got frostbite, which attacked my left hand.

Fortunately I was holding a packet of Findus Fish Fingers at the time, and so my own fingers came to no harm. Admittedly it was my own fault. I had noticed earlier that the motor at the back of the fridge was becoming very warm, and I wanted to prevent a fire so I turned down the temperature on the thermostat.

I often interfere with things that I’m not supposed to.

A while ago I was sitting on an aeroplane going to one of the Americas, and I noticed that the pilot was taking a longer route than I considered neccessary. So I borrowed one of the oars from the emergency dinghy and pushed it out of the window against a nearby cloud, to push the plane slightly to the left.Then I noticed that there was a starboard in the way, and I became worried that I might crash the plane into some stars, causing a tear in the fabric of space-time, which would have caused us to arrive several hours late.

So I quietly lassood the cloud with some toilet paper dragging the aircraft back to it’s original route. Then I made my way gingerly back to seat 7a, where I watched Men in Black. It wasn’t showing on in-flight movie system. It’s just that I have a photographic memory that can store approximatelly eighty five minutes of film, and Men in Black is one of the few movies short enough to fit.

But I digress.

Margarine Flies first arrived here in Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, around the time of the Potatoe Famine.

They were safe here because people didn’t have any potatoes and so they didn’t need margarine. Besides which, everyone who wasn’t dead was emigrating to one of the Americas, as many of you will have learnt from the recent motion picture “Gangs of New York”, directed by Martin Scorsecesece.

Scorseceseccceseeee was of course born and bred in Ireland. That’s why he knows so much about my country. In fact, my mother went to school with him at her local girls’ school in the west of Ireland. “It’s a small world”, as people like to say. It certainly is.

I measured the distance from my computer desk to the front door earlier, and it was only a few feet. Let’s say the earth is twenty times that distance, just for the sake of argument. If that’s the case, then it’s still only half a mile round the equator. That would explain why it’s possible to see the horizon from my bedroom window.

I was watching a programme about one of the Australias the other day, and the horizon was clearly visible from one of their beaches. So that means the Australias are locateds just over the horizon. Bloody hell.

And yet my local travel agent is charging over a thousand euro for a one way ticket.

Anyway, I seem to have got diverted from the subject of the Margarine Fly. I’ll have to come back to it another day.

Neal’s Belch no. 144 for 12th Jul, 2004

Yesterday I was on my way out of a train station when I noticed something that I had never noticed before.

Without exception, every single one of the turnstiles at the exits was set to turn in a clockwise direction. So I did some research and it turns out that all turnstiles and revolving doors in the northern hemisphere turn that way, while everything south of the equator goes counter-clockwise.

Apparently the same is true of the way liquids swirl clockwise or anti-clockwise when you pour them down the sink. For some reason that I can’t quite fathom, the hands on clocks move clockwise no matter what part of the world you are in.

But this got me thinking. What would happen if I started messing with the laws of gravity or magnetism or whatever you call it? Would I get in trouble with the law? I mean, who the hell set up all these scientific laws anyway. Where I come from, if you want to pass a law you must first put yourself up for election to the national parliament, and then convince a majority of your colleagues to vote for your proposed piece of legislation.

But apparently if you’re Isaac Newton or somebody, you can pass a law just by saying stuff that nobody else understands.

As an aside here, I would just like to pay tribute to all of the scientists throughout the ages who have experimented with apples. I myself once ate an apple right through to the core, and on seeing the hard white flesh near the centre, and thinking about it in silence for a few long minutes, came up with an idea for an essay about turnips for my website.

So I can easily see how an apple could provide inspiration for such masterpieces as Newton’s Gravity Yoke, or whatever he came up with. Really if we’re being fair, we should give credit to the apples, not the scientist. But this is a topsy turvy world and for some reason it’s always the human, not the inaminate organic food, that gets thanked.

Anyway, back to the thing about laws of science. Now I, as a private citizen, am not empowered to pass a law, for example, that bans television stations from killing selected viewers who change stations during the commercials.

However, apparently I am completely free to legislate that “What goes up, must spin three times, freeze for a second like a tense moment in a cartoon, then come down”, and call it “Neal’s Law of Going up and Spinning”, Because that’s science. So I’ve decided that I’m going to take advantage of this new-found power by passing some new scientific laws.

I hereby order that cats cannot land on their feet unless they are covered in orange marmalade and humming the theme tune from Frasier.

Okay that’s enough for now. I don’t want to abuse my priviledges. In fact, in the above short paragraph I’ve achieved pretty much everything I set out to achieve when I decided to go into politics, so I’m going to retire now.

I think I can achieve more by quietly campaigning and maybe making a few Euros on the lecture circuit to support myself. You know, when I was a twelve year old I wanted to change the world.

I thought I would become Prime Minister of my country and I would outlaw all crime and remove poverty forever. Then I came to realise that all crime is already outlawed, so I decided to concentrate on a cure for poverty. The solution I came up with was to give everybody a large quantity of money and order them not to spend it. Then nobody would ever be poor ever again and we would all live happily ever after.

Just like in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Although Goldilocks, of course, would never have dreamed of putting orange marmalade on her cat’s paws. And this refusal to conform with the norms or our society would mean she is now guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal under my new “Orange Marmalade Humming Act, 2004”, referred to earlier.

But you shouldn’t take from this that I am a staunch conservative who wants to hang all criminals and then put them in jail after they’re dead. No.

All I’m saying is that it’s fun to make laws that annoy people, especially those who have cats or who refuse to keep a minimum level of marmalade in stock. These are the same people who you see at polling booths, scratching their heads and trying to make a last minute decision about who to vote for. My country now has colour photos on the ballot sheet, so you can pick which candidate has the best hair, and vote for him or her without having to find out who they are or what they stand for.

So it’s not all bad. And I never said it was. I’m not a glass-half-empty person. It’s not empty until I shove the flat, day-old coke from last night down my parched throat at seven o’clock the next morning because I don’t have time to make coffee. 

Then it’s empty. And that brings me nicely back to the hemispheres / clockwise / anticlockwise thing. Because there’s going to be nothing left in the glass to throw down the sink and test which way it swirls as it disappears down the drain.

So now we’ll never know.

Neal’s Belch no. 143 for 9th Jul, 2004

I’ve recently been teaching myself how to play the piano, and I’ve found, to my amazement that I’m very good at it.

And now that I come to think about it, that’s lucky, because it would be very difficult and impractical to teach myself the piano if I wasn’t already equipped with the knowledge and skills neccessary to play it. You can’t have a piano teacher who isn’t able to play the piano. That would be just stupid.

Anyway, while I was having a look at the various elephant and tree parts that make up the piano, I realised that the keys bear a striking resemblance to the road-markings used at pedestrian crossings here in Ireland.

In order to be thorough in my research for this article, I climbed up onto the piano and walked along the keys. And sure enough, no traffic crossed the keyboard in either direction while I was crossing it. I was very impressed.

Then I remembered the guitar that the previous occupant of my flat left in the wardrobe, and the three violins which are in the attic at my parents’ place, and I came up with an idea that could save my country billions of euros in building costs over the next five years.

All stringed instruments have a little part called a “bridge”, which sits under the strings somewhere between the neck and the big hole that makes the music. Now, I know it’s just a small strip of wood or plastic, but I tried out the piano-crossing thing and it worked fine, so I propose that we get the manufacturers to make more bridges than they need, and we can use them as pedestrian bridges accross railways lines and motorways.

I’m not suggesting for one moment that vehicles should be allowed to be driven across these bridges.

And by the way I don’t claim to be an expert in all of the architectural issues involved. But the basic idea is sound, I’m sure. I’m an ideas person, not a details person. I leave the details to somebody else who isn’t able to write and think as beautifully and gracefully as I do. It would be an enormous waste of my talents if I were to spend my days working out the practicalities involved in turning part of a musical instrument into a pedestrian overpass. There are other, lesser people, who can be happy doing that.

Yesterday I wandered into a road museum and found myself enthralled by the section where they keep the old road markings.

It’s fascinating to see how they have evolved through the decades since the invention of the motor vehicle. The first dotted white lines, for example, were made from flattened ivory, taken from recycled piano keyboards. The elephants were forced to stamp on their own ivory, to flatten it into rectangular pieces, before being sent off to wildlife college to be reprogrammed as hippopotamuseseses.

Then, obviously, somebody “discovered” (i.e. travelled into the future and stole my idea) the possibility of using this ivory to make zebra crossings. Sadly (ha ha suckers) they misread my essay and thought I was suggesting that these crossings would be used by striped zoo animals, rather than humans.

Since there aren’t very many zebras around these days, the people who suggested it started to look pretty stupid, and they were fired from their jobs at the National Roads Authority.

Ironically two of the three officials involved have since taken up employment at a local zoo, where they are designing a new enclosure for the zebras. The main problem they have is that the payroll at the zoo lists staff in alphabetical order of which animal they look after, so anyone involved with zebras is at the bottom of the list. The always run out of money just after the “w”s. Which is a shame.

Personally, I think it would be rather interesting to be a walrus feeder at a zoo.

Walruses are very similar to cats in that they have whiskers and they lie about playing with string and eating tuna. Alhough admitedly I eat tuna too, so obviously it’s not quite as simple as that.

Things cannot always be boiled down to a simple single phrase that sums everything up and gets the message accross. I learned this the hard way when I promised the editor of The Times of London (Ireland Edition) that I could produce an abridged version of Stephen King’s “The Stand”, and do it in fifteen words or less. The words that I came up with were all very accurate and self expanatory, but when I tried to assemble them into a sentence of some sort, the whole thing fell apart. The best that I could come up with was “Always look on the bright side of life. Whistle”.

The editor of the aforemetioned newspaper wrote a very polite but firm letter to me, explaining (in what I thought was a rather patronising tone by the way) that not only was the phrase copyrighted to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but also that it was technically two sentences, not one, which was obviously a breach of my contract.

So you see, you may think you have a good idea, and you may think that you know how to make it work. But there’s always going to be some bamtard with a big chair and a scary voice who wants to knock you down.

So let’s all just give up and go knit ourselves a giant balaclava with no mouth hole, big enough to wrap round the earth and keep it all nice and warm at night.

That’s pretty much all we can do.

Neal’s Belch no. 142 for 2nd Jul, 2004

I’ve noticed that recently my fingernails have been becoming longer and longer. I assume it’s because I’m evolving in some way or other, and that part of this process involves growing a shell.

This couldn’t have come at a better time, because house prices here in Ireland are soaring and I can’t get a decent apartment on my salary. I suppose I could grow a house if I really needed too, but it’s so stressfull waiting for the seeds to germinate and wondering whether it’s going to be a boy house or a girl house. Not that it matters, but you really need to know where the main entrance is going to be, if the house is going to line up with your garden path properly.

Anyway, the reason why all this came up is that I was in Dublin Zoo a few weeks ago and I noticed that some of the staff who work in the primates section had devolved into monkeys. Not only that, it became apparent after a few minutes of exploring that one of the giraffes had mated with a monkey and there was a guy with a really long neck walking around busily trying to evolve so that he could re-integrate himself into modern society.

When I was around six years old I asked Santa Claus to give me a monkey for Christmas. My parents called Santa on their rather primitive early nineteen eighties cellphone, and made sure that he had received my letter which I had sent by telex from my bedroom the previous evening.

Now, I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but what I received on Christmas day was not the cute little black furry creature that I had expected. It was a tall yellow duck with an orange beak and, for some reason, a striped t-shirt which was sewn onto it’s torso. Duckegg (such was the name that I gave him) fell apart after a couple of years. They don’t make stuffed toy ducks like they used to. His head started to become seperated from his body at the back within weeks, and it wasn’t long before my bedroom floor became strewn with lost stuffing. Although technically it wasn’t lost because I knew where it was.

It was right there. On the floor.

Anyway, for some reason Duckegg had two legs and two arms. And this confused me, as a child. What was I supposed to think? That ducks have arms and stand upright? Well, I suppose they do stand upright but I’m pretty sure ducks aren’t supposed to have arms. It’s just not the done thing.

Then I realised.

It became mindbogglingly obvious to me. The toy companies were conspiring to hasten the evolution of children so that they would demand more sophisticated and challenging toys from Santa Claus. They were doing this by making incorrectly limbed toy ducks which would force the children to use every ounce of brain power that they had, to try to figure out what the hell was going on. This would cause their brains to grow and that was exactly the type of evolution that the toy manufacturers wanted. So that’s what happened.

But I’m sure you’re wondering, where did it all end.

Well, I dunno.

I really can’t be bothered today. I should have just written something about cats, because that’s so much easier. But no, I had to pick an unbeaten path as usual, and discuss a topic about which there exists very little solid research to rely on.

I probably told myself something about needing to excercise my mind, or some such carp. You know, when I was in school we used to be told to take our pencil for a walk, meaning draw a neverending line and keep drawing until the page was covered in shapes.

We were then given some pencils and told to colour the shapes with the crayons. You could always tell when the teacher had a hangover and wanted an easy day.

And that’s pretty much what I’m going to do now.

Here’s your crayons. Knock yourself out. Just try not to eat them because I’m not completely sure they aren’t toxic. And besides you shouldn’t ruin your appetite between meals. If you must, have a piece of fruit or a serving of vegetables instead. I always find that a carrot is excellent for drawing orange things. You would think an orange would do it better, but there’s too much liquid in an orange. So it’s only good for watercolours. Although the peel is excellent for making marmalade.

I’ve deleted a paragraph here at the end, because it wasn’t terribly exciting. In case you’re wondering, it was a brief discussion about the problems involved in carrying out time and-motion studies in marmalade factories. But you knew that already. I’m becoming so predictable these days.