Month: October 2004

Neal’s Belch no. 163 for 1st Oct, 2004

I’ve always been fascinated by the ability of seagulls to fly through dry, non salty air which doesn’t even have any fishes swimming around in it.

You don’t see whales doing that. They just beach themselves and wait for the locals to either hire a crane or chop them up into whale fillets while a passing seagull craps happily over them from above. I think it’s something to do with the way they’re brought up. Seagulls tend to be encouraged to leave the nest. By the age of eighteen, your average seagull has moved out from home and is either living at University or in a bedsitingroom apartment somewhere near the big city.

Whales, on the other hand, carry on living in the sea with their extended family for their entire lives.

They dream of leaving, of course. But when there are only seven seas to choose from they are bound to end up living near relatives no matter where they go to. That’s the sad truth about whales and seagulls Although obviously it’s not sad for the seagulls, except the ones who care about whales – but there’s not too many of those.

The seagull is a selfish creature, not given to thinking about the needs of other creatures with whom it is forced, as the seagull sees it, to share the earth. The seagull would be much happier if it had a whole planet to itself.

Seagullworld would be a haven of peacefullness and amphibianity, where nobody ever gets stranded on beaches and the seagulls don’t get made into whale fillets, unless there’s a new young trainee chef on the block who can’t tell the difference between a seagull and a whale, and who also has the ability to fly.

But there aren’t very many of those.

Chefs’ hats, you see, are built to a very un-aerodynamic design. This is done to comply with one of the hygiene regulations, which states that people who work in the preparation of food for public consumption, must wear headgear that is not likely to blow away if a gust of air shoots out from a just-opened oven. A quite legitimate concern, of course, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of making chefs unable to fly, at least while they’re on duty.

Nurses don’t generally have this problem, by the way.

Their hats are much more aerodynamically shaped. Unfortunately, this (mostly female) sector of the medical profession is racked with inhibitions and lack confidence in their flying abilities, so it is very rare, if ever, that you will see a nurse flying over a dead whale and crapping on everybody.

Unlike the good old confident seagull.

Personally, I don’t hardly ever fly at all. When I want to go somewhere that is a particularly long way away from me, I generally hire the services of a commericial airliner and a pilot. I keep the cost down by sharing the aeroplane with a few hundred other paying passengers, and we keep the toilet facilities to a minimum.

Sometimes we splash out and arrange for a motion picture to be shone onto a screen on the inside of the aircraft, if it’s a transatlantic flight like the one I will be taking in a couple of weeks.

In the olden days, before there were planes, people used to have to drive everywhere, and it was a right royal pain in the ass. The car used to get wet and the salt water would damage the paintwork, and sometimes the car would sink, and you’d have to flag someone down and get them to tow you back up to the surface.

There was no such thing as in-car entertainment, either. The local radio stations in the middle of the atlantic are mostly intolerable, producing low brow nonsense aimed mainly at sea horses who like to listen to horse racing commentaries and who spend their days fantasising about the life of their athletic cousins who live on dry land.

For some reason they are envious of land horses, who get to run around a track and who spend their Sunday afternoons hoping they don’t trip over a snail and break their legs, because we all know what happens to horses whose legs get broken, don’t we? If a human breaks a leg, it gets put in a plaster and it’s all fine after a few weeks. But apparently the medical treatment for horses with the same ailment is different, in that they get shot in the head rather than bandaged up.

Neal’s Belch 165 for 7th Oct, 2004

A short, short time ago, in a galaxy not too far from here – unless of course you subscribe to the rather old fashioned linear view of distance and time, in which case it’s gazillions of light years away – two cats walked into a bar. One of the cats was already substantially intoxicated, having partaken in an organised pub crawl earlier in the evening. The other cat was dead, but had been spotted by a taxidermist and stuffed. Unfortunately his fur had become infected with ants and effectively this was a walking ant colony, not a cat. The ants, invigorated by their collective, new-found ability to walk on four legs and get let into a bar disguised as a deceased cat, were taking full advantage of the situation.

Anyway, the first cat – or to be accurate, the only one of the two creatures who can truly and accurately be described as a cat – goes up to the bar and orders a Guinness. It all goes fine, and he gets his Guinness and sits down and it’s nice and we don’t need to worry about that particular cat any more. He had a nice evening and a rather entertaining one too, which he spent watching the other “cat” trying to order a drink.

I say “trying” to order a drink, because when you’re not really a cat but a dead stuffed cat covered in millions of ants, each of whom have individual tastes in beverages, it’s not easy to order a drink. The powerful right wing anti-alcohol lobby in the colony managed to make the most noise, so in the end the “cat” ordered a pint of milk and a cheese sandwich. Although several of the younger anti globalisation ants complained that the idea that cats are partial to cheese, is a stereotype created by the media. But nobody listened because they were hungry, and after all, you don’t get much choice in a pub. Unless you like corned beef, which cats don’t. I know they don’t because I heard it in the media.

Several years later, a dog walked into the same bar. The dog was alive, but infested with fleas, all of whom were thirsty. Luckily, fleas are all brainless and they will buy whatever the the advertisers throw at them. So the dog, who wanted a vodka lemonade, stood in front of a poster advertising vodca lemondade until all of the fleas had seen it and became convinced that the only thing that would make them happy was a serving of that beverage. So that all went fine.

It just goes to show, doesn’t it, that it’s much better to be a live dog infested with fleas, than a dead cat infested with ants. That’s what I draw from the story, anyway. Maybe you’ve read something different into it. And that’s fine. It’s not as if I’m trying to tell you what to think. If I was, I would do it subliminally. D r ink C o ca-Cola. But I don’t. I’ve always found that if you want to convince somebody of something, the best way to go about it is to get them drunk, bring them to a disreputable hypnotist, murder the hypnotist in cold blood and somehow convince the person, when they sober up, that they did it. Then all you have to do is tell them that you’ll keep quiet so long as they agree with everything you say. It’s as simple as that.

Anyway, the two cats had a great time in the end, even though one of them wasn’t a cat. The band were playing Queen songs and they both won t-shirts that said “I’m with stoopid”, and had an arrow pointing to the left. One of them chose to wear his upside-down. partly so that the arrow would point the other way, and partly because his neck was much thicker than his waist and he always wore t-shirts upside down. Which, by the way, was the reason why he was dead. He had, a couple of days before, underestimated the width of his neck when choosing a new collar and tie, and choked himself to death. It just goes to show, doesn’t it, that it’s very important to get measured properly when buying clothing.

By the way I noticed, while writing this several years ago, that “ants” is almost an anagram of “cats”. Almost.

Neal’s Belch no. 164 for 5th Oct, 2004

Several years ago I was walking along my local river bank, checking out the security system and making draft plans for an upcoming bank robbery that I might be involved in, when I noticed a funny thing.

A clown was sitting on a large rock just under the bridge, throwing custard pies at his imaginary friend and sounding the horn on his battered old car. Now, you may think that’s a little corny, and I’m inclined to agree, but I burst out laughing nevertheless.

And as a result I was arrested for scaring a small child who was passing at the time. While I was languishing in the police cell an inmate taught me how to pick locks with my toenails, so obviously I decided I was never going to cut them again.

Soon after, I rented a stall for the weekend at my local outdoor market and offered all of my toenail scissors for sale to the general public. I had intended to use the proceeds to pay back a friend who had put up the bail money, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a profit. This was mainly due to the exhorbitant and prohibitive cost of primetime television advertising slots here in Ireland.

Not being one to give up, I invested my hundred Euro losses in a consolidation loan. Unfortunately I inadvertently used the same bank that I had been seen acting suspiciously in a few days before, and I somehow ended up in jail again.

This time I decided that if any other inmate offered to teach me a usefull skill, I would immediately jam both of my forefingers in my ears and sing the loud rock part of “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the top of my voice to avoid acquiring any information that could get me into further trouble. Unfortunately this tactic caused me not to hear the screws banging on the door with my meals, and as a result I ended up in hospital being treated for malnutrition.

The hospital staff were lovely, I must say, and I felt very well looked after.

They even cut my toenails and offered to direct me to a store where I could replenage my supply of toe nail clippers and get back to where I was before I made my foolish mistakes. Sadly they didn’t tell me that I would have to pay for these instruments.

So I ended up back in jail for shoplifting. While I was languishing in the police cell an inmate taught me how to pick locks with my toenails, so obviously I decided I was never going to cut them again.

For that reason, I rented a stall for the weekend at my local outdoor market and offered all of my toenail scissors for sale to the general public. I had intended to use the proceeds to pay back a friend who had put up the bail money, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a profit.

This was mainly due to the exhorbitant and prohibitive cost of primetime television advertising slots here in Ireland.However, I had such a headache from the stress of going bankrupt that I went to the doctor.

It was nothing serious, I’m glad to say.

But he did say that I had a tendency to get my stories confused and sometimes even repeat things as if they had happened more than once in my life. Apparently it’s a bit like “deja-vu”, except that you don’t know it’s happening until a doctor points it out to you.

Anyway the following day, I went to the doctor, because I had a headache from the enormous stress of having gone out of business. Luckily, it was nothing serious. And he just gave me some pills.

From 2004 or thereabouts

You could do a lot worse than to live your life by the dictum “Es orilles agoraphobia”, which, as you are no doubt aware, means “Drink water until the fishes no longer have a home”.

That said, many of us find sea water to be a little too fizzy for our. tastes. I, for example,  have gone to great lengths to ensure that our home’s water supply comes from an inland source. I decided to have the courage of my convictions, and one day  just rang up the water company and demanded that they connect me to a non salt reservoir.

To my surprise, it turned out that I was pushing on an open door.

Not only did they give in to me without an argument, but the telephone operator promised to disconnect me from all sea water sources at the push of a button, within the hour. I was most impressed.

I’m now seriously considering venturing into the utilities business on my own. My idea is to drill for home heating gas in one of the lakes around here, then become a supplier of water and gas through one single pipe, from the same source. The efficiency savings will be enormous, and not only that, the gas could be used to heat your bath water in the pipes before it even reaches your house.

The other alternative that I have in mind is to go into fish farming. I will specialise in oily fish, but unlike other manufacturers I will heat the oil in the factories, and sell hot cooked sardines in tins to those whose lives are too busy to go around heating fish.

After finishing their sardine meals, customers will then have the option of pouring the oil into their central heating system and, assuming they eat sardines eight times a day, they’ll be saving a fortune on household bills.

I’ve always been baffled at the way the sardine industry works.

They are so set in their ways, and seem determined to carry on their age old practice of picking tiny baby sardines that are so small, they have to put a dozen or more in each tin. Many of them don’t even have a business class section any more, so no matter how far your company’s travel budget is prepared to stretch, you have no choice but to be squashed in with your ten or twelve siblings as you make your way home, without so much as an in-flight movie to keep you entertained.

Smoked Salmon manufacturers, on the other hand, wait until the fishes have grown nice and big and tall, then put them on a diet so that each salmon is tall and wide but very flat, and can be squeezed into an easy-to-transport flat vacuum pack, and brought by rail or road to it’s destination.

In my youth I spent a Summer working as a packer of artificial Christmas trees in a local factory, and if I took anything away from that job, it my ever present awareness of the irony of turning real trees into cardboard boxes, then putting fake trees into the boxes. It really does make you think. It also makes your arms very tired, so I left after a few weeks.

Nowadays of course kids refuse point blank to eat pork,  dolphins or sharks for dinner, thanks to movies like “Babe”, “A Shark’s Tale” and “Free Willy”,

Parents are so desperate to get their offspring to consume something healthy, that they have taken to disguising sardines as Gingerbread Men, just like the one in the fairy story. Let’s hope to hell Disney don’t try to turn that into a cute little movie.

Walt, ironically, had his entire body cryogenically frozen on death, because of his obsessive fear that his corpse might, against his wishes, be fed to pigs after his demise. Pigs of course are renowned for their inability to eat frozen food, and the late animation creator remains intact to this day.