Sir Walter Raleigh was an Asshole

Neal’s Belch 189 from Jan 2005

As a former piano player, I appreciate the anger caused by the misuse of a keyboard on the cover of a certain album by The Beatles, the name of which escapes me, on which the band members were to be seen using a keyboard as a sort of mat to cross a muddy road in Winter, in the vein of Sir Walter Raleigh. Although of course he did it much more stylishly.

Sadly, he cheapened his reputation by going on to invent a rather tacky stunt bicycle for children, hence wasting his wonderful talents which he could have put to much more productive uses.

Uses such as, for example, inventing a method whereby footbridges might be built using much cheaper materials and lower labour costs. He really was an asshole to come up with a puddle traversement system and just leave it at that.

Surely it was his duty to share the endless possibilities of this discovery with the world? Think of all the men and women who died building the Golden Gate Bridge, when all along they could have just tossed a giant cloak across the river and barely gotten themselves wet.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Neal has finally run out of ideas for a Belch, and has taken to writing down whatever words spring into his mind, without even caring to consider how they look to the reader. And you’d be largely right about that, but you really shouldn’t think so much. You’ll end up with an oversized brain and then you’ll have to spend money on a new hat, your credit card debt will get out of control, your finances will spiral into a cauldron-like hole in the earth, rather like Dante’s famous seven circles of hell in the book / painting / poem / movie / cartoons “Dante’s Inferno”.

I can never remember which it is, but I’m sure it got rave reviews at the time. Those sorts of things always do, don’t they?

That’s a rhetorical question by the way, but that doesn’t mean you are not obliged to answer it. It just means that I can’t hear you, so I will just have to make a best guess as to what your reply will be, and then let you know whether you are right or wrong.

As it happens, you’re right, but there’s no need to be so cocky about it. Any idiot had a fifty: fifty chance of getting it. It was just a case of picking the right fifty. Not all fifties are the same, you know. Some are a little older and have become discoloured, and fifties manufactured after nineteen ninety are smaller, due to the Irish Central Bank’s efforts to reduce the sizes of coins to make them cheaper.

Then there was that other thing, The Yellow Brick Road, which resulted in a sudden and unmanageable increase in demand for yellow paving, and had appalling economic consequences. Frankly, I don’t care about that, but it’s interesting to note that both Elton John and Captain Beefheart performed songs about the yellow brick road, yet neither were used for the motion picture “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, due to the film-makers having rushed it out decades before these wonderful soundtracks were ready.

And that brings me to my point.