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.