Month: March 2012

Gathered together in one place for the first time, here is everything I know about how to design and build things.

• If you build a floor with a ceiling immediately below it, people will think they’re upstairs, and eventually jump out a window to try to escape.
  
• If you build two floors, one right on top of the other, people will assume you’ve accidentally omitted a ceiling and thirteen feet of headspace.
  
• Make your own window: Put two mirrors back to back and place a series of peripheral mirrors in position to reflect one mirror onto the other. Alternatively, just place two two-way mirrors back to back.
  
• Cleaning the outside of a pane of glass is pointless unless you also clean the inside. This is why mirrors don’t work.
  
• Contrary to popular misconception among furniture manufacturers, a Table Tennis table only needs to have two sides, not four.
  
• If you build two walls right up against each other, the pro-agoraphobic brigade will jump down your throat like you’re some sort of evil Nazi.
  
• Because of the ease with which a passing burglar can see potential rich pickings, people who live in glasshouses shouldn’t store thrones.
  
• However, contrary to popular misunderstanding, it is not particularly risky for people who live in glass houses to throw stones, as long as it’s done outside in a large open space, away from the glass house.
  
• Building a partition wall between two rooms is always a pointless exercise, since there is already a wall there.
  
• Cleaning the outside of a pane of glass is pointless unless you also clean the inside This is why mirrors are a waste of money
  
• If you build a room that’s so big it takes up a whole continent, don’t expect any gratitude for all your hard work. That’s all I’ll say. 
  
• If you install a staircase upside down, it’s not really a problem
  
• If you build a wall that goes all the way up to the clouds, people will whinge about dampness and make assumptions about your religious persuasion.
  
• If you build an exact, life size replica of the universe, critics will pan your work as being “derivative”.

Together for the first time (as of 2012), here are some facts that I have gathered over the past couple of years about Ostriches, Eskimos and Camels.

• The Eskimos have eight hundred and seventy-six words for “snow”, but no word for “phlegm retardant cat”.
  
• An ostrich will often bury it’s head in the sand so that it looks like a fifth foot, thereby confusing predators.
  
• A camel will often sink it’s hooves into the sand so that it looks like four ostriches, thereby confusing predators.
  
• An ostrich will sometimes bury it’s entire body in the sand to look like the head of a much larger ostrich,
  
• An ostrich will sometimes bury it’s bodily waste in the sand, in the manner of a cat, thereby confusing predators.
  
• The Eskimos used to be referred to as “The Eskimo”, back when there was only one of them.
  
• The Eskimos have eight thousand words for “snow”, but absolutely no word for “I am not an Eskimo”.
  
• Eskimos have 564 words for snow, but no word for “word for snow”.
  
• At an ostrich funeral, the mourners bury their heads in the sand and wait until the deceased ostrich has been removed by vultures.
  
• People who have an obsession with ostriches and don’t know what’s wrong with them, often ignore the problem and bury their heads in the sand
  
• Interestingly, there is no information whatsoever in my local library, or those in surrounding counties, about people who are obsessed with Eskimos.
  

Assembled in 2012 from a series of insomniacal tweets, if I remember rightly.

Must be sea salt. Probably smells of fish.

You know, it’s weird that pigs are so salty, when they are mostly not raised in sea water. They must be adding something artificial to them. And of course, they’re training our kids to be ignorant with these so-called “crème eggs”. Chocolate comes from cows and cocoa plants, not hens. I mean, if you try to remove the shell from one of those things, your hands get all covered in brown crap.

Whither Louis Pasteur?

And when you think about it, chocolateers are really pushing it with “min eggs”. A real chicken foetus could not have developed a yolk at that early stage in it’s development, never mind a chocolate outer lining. Ridiculous. And don’t get me started on white chocolate eggs. Artificial colouring gone mad.

That said, if the statistics for people’s preferences in chocolate colours had been used as a basis for the original South Africa, the darker chocolate would always have had it’s place as the majority. I’m probably over simplifying the issues here, but now that you mention it, I’ve been to South Africa, brought back three ostrich eggs from different regions, and they’re all white. Meanwhile the New Zealanders call their rugby team the “All Blacks”, and you never hear anything about their eggs.

It’s a mad world.

First published as a series of overcaffeinated tweets @intoyourheadpod

From the old IYH podcast blog, March 2012

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of the ancient Roman vomitorium.

Constantly we are told that the Mediterranean diet is among the best in the world, yet for millennia upon millennia, these people have been regurgitating their supposedly delicious food almost as soon as they’ve eaten it. And we’re not talking about teenagers with eating disorders here. These are men and women of all ages and sexes.

Nowadays of course, it is de rigueur for the young generation to stick their fingers down their throats and try to dislodge the chicken bone that’s been stuck there since dinner time. In my day it was considered sufficient to clear a path only through the zone that can be reached by a standard toothpick. Nowadays they not only have to poke the food out of their trachea, they even get their stomachs pumped by a medical professional because they have become heavy with liquids.

Clearing a path through one’s trachea, it must be remembered, is not remotely similar to clearing a path through a snowdrift on your front path. For one thing, if you don’t clear your path you can be held legally responsible for the injuries of anyone who comes to harm because of the frozen precipitation on the ground in front of your house.

Leaving your throat blocked has no consequences for anyone other than yourself. And most people are unlikely to attempt to pursue a writ against themselves in the civil courts, as it is very difficult to get one’s legal costs back, even if they are awarded in full to the plaintiff.

Furthermore, courts nowadays tend to dissuade members of the public from attempting to represent themselves, unless they are well adept in the intricacies of the legal system, and have shown that they understand fully the financial risks involved. Anyway, two cats walk into a bar.

One of the cats is a trained lawyer, and is able to get through his evening without doing anything that results in litigation against him. The other cat, sadly, knows nothing about the law, and recklessly goes about flirting with girl cats in the bar, spilling beer on the floor and offering drinks to other patrons. He thereby puts himself at risk of being sued for sexual harassment, negligence and manslaughter, should the drink prove to be poisonous.

Fortunately none of these worst case scenarios happen, and a good night is had by all.

Published March 2012 as an Into Your Head Blog post.

As I write this (many eons ago, when you could still get Red Bar Cola without travelling to Mars), I’m just back from buying a device to retrieve a tank full of fuel from our old car, to use in the new one. A deluxe aquarium gravel-cleaner is to be my petrol-siphoning accessory of choice. I have only have to salvage €6.49 of fuel from the old car to break even. Allowing for spills of course. Although I suppose I could just prohibit those. Lateral thinking is still legal here, last I checked.

Of course, “normal” folk would probably have gone into the Halford’s next door to the pet shop and bought a petrol siphon. That’s why Hitler won. I know what you’re thinking. But since my country was never officially at war, we can hardly declare victory over the Nazis, can we? Especially when I’ve just spent a Sunday morning drinking German-made Red Bull Cola.

That’s not to say that I’d have anything against being invaded by a modern day German dictator, now that they have a fully democratic and benign government. And I know what you’re thinking there, too. But I have a vote whether you like it or not. That’s what these wars were fought for.

Freedom.

An IYH Podcast blog from, 2012,

Back in the early to mid two-thousands, in my then regular online column entitled “Neal’s Belch” on my then website MatchstickCats.com, I started to tell you about a colony of Anteaters who lived off the coast of Rwanda. At the time I somehow got sidetracked onto the subject of macroeconomics, then got into podcasting and have just passed my five hundredth episode of Into Your Head. So let’s pick up where we left off.

After he got back from the launderette that day, William’s outlook on life had, of course, changed forever. No longer did he waste his day lying on the beach watching the waves float by. No. Instead William determinately set to work on the new railway that would bring peace and prosperity to his homeland. So anyway eight years later the railway opened, but sadly ticket prices were uneconomical and everybody had cars by that stage, so it was all a flop. William didn’t give a crap though. He had his golden handshake.

William had acquired his unique golden hand when he was fourteen, after a bout of glandular fever. At nineteen he had floated it on the stock exchange and made his millions. But nobody was able to help him find a way to liquidise his millions of hands, so he had been sitting on the stock ever since. The refrigeration and manicuring costs alone were massive, and he ended up transporting them across Russia by train to somewhere cold enough to not need refrigeration. There he dumped them and left the useless little bastards to fend for themselves.

This brings me to my point. Several years ago I boarded a train here in Ireland and sat down, as is my habit, in the front seat of the front carriage. I find that from there I can get a good view of the tracks ahead, which is important because I need to navigate and watch out for red lights, for which I am obliged to stop. Also of course I have to watch out for stray cats on the line. If I see a stray cat, I have to gently guide it back onto the tracks, and then call for a locomotive to come and tow it back to the station.

The staff there are always very kind to the stray cats. They sometimes take them out for a ride when they go to raid a house. Cats love being taken out in police vans. Cats like to imagine that they are criminal masterminds, who have tricked the cops into giving a ride to the very criminal for whom they are supposed to be hunting. Cats are funny. Anyway I’m out of steam. You should go read something else. Or alternatively I could just carry on driving this into the ground.

I’ve always enjoyed driving things into the ground. I think it’s because I have happy childhood memories of camping holidays, where driving a tent peg into the ground meant it was almost time to go to bed, and make shadow-puppets of cats with my knuckles on the inside of the tent. Those were happy days. Just me and my teddy bear Bowsy and my torch and my parents and my eighteen brothers.

Pardon?

No, no cats involved. That’s becoming a bit of a cliché. You can overdo the cat thing, you know. I know when to stop. So anyway I’ve changed my mind about marmalade recently. I think you should only put it on one side of the toast, thereby halving your chances of a total loss if it falls on the ground. That’s of course assuming a hygiene insistence level of only thirty percent. I think that’s about right for most of my readers. Personally, I have higher standards than that. But only because I have linked my cleanliness level to the NASDAQ index, which happens to be doing well at time of writing (several years ago). Next time there’s a financial scandal or something, I go back to three pairs a week.

And I can’t do anything about it. That’s the free market economy at work. If you’re going to complain about marmalade toast falling face-down on the floor, you may as well hand the nuclear briefcase over to Saddam Hussein, and throw him the keys as well.

A Neal’s Belch or Newsburp or some damn thing from circa 2004.

I always like to sit on the fence when contemplating issues of great controversy. For one thing, I find that it toughens up my thigh muscles, as well as my ability to endure pain. Endurance is very important in a world where you could at any moment inadvertently switch on the channel that shows Judge Judy. Anyway, it seems to me that there are two sides to everything. I discovered this to my cost yesterday morning, when I got out the wrong side of my bed, which I now know has two sides. The window was open at the time, and I fell out of it and landed on the fence, in a sitting position, and that’s how all this started.

Recently my country had a referendum on whether or not it should be illegal to steal things from sweet shops. We’re a rather old fashioned and conservative nation, so everybody voted yes. But anyway while we were all debating the issue in the run-up to polling day, I agreed to take part in a televised debate in which I represented both sides of the argument. It was rather tiring, running from one podium to the other every time I switched sides to argue against myself, but apart from that it went fine, thanks for asking. I successfully argued that anyone who pilfers a fizzy cola bottle should be hung, drawn and quartered, then I ran over to the other side of the stage and criticised myself for being an extremist.

I suggested that rather than fighting the crime, we should fight the causes of crime, and examine why people feel the need to take fizzy cola bottles from their fellow human beings. After that I rushed back to my original seat and branded myself a “ninny”, saying that this was political correctness gone mad. The audience applauded warmly. They love when you show the other side up as a complete idiot.

Anyway the outcome of all this was that it’s still illegal to steal sweets in this pathetic, backward little place in which I live. So we all have to make our own. We do this by removing cake decorations and stamping on the cake until it becomes small enough to be called a sweet. It works very well so long as you don’t go too far. If you do, the cake becomes so dense that a black hole is formed. Even then, it’s probably going to be fine because with a bit of luck the universe at the other side of the black hole will have recently liberalised the sweet laws and you’ll be able to go over there and score yourself some Jelly Babies.

Just be careful that you don’t wander into the universe where cats have become all-powerful and omnipresent. Because then you’ll get caught, and despite the fact that it’s not illegal to steal sweets there, they’ll extradite you to your own universe and plant some fake evidence on you. They won’t mean any harm by it. Cats just like being playful with you. I myself once had a cat who liked to play drinking games with me. Strip poker was his particular favourite, but he always lost instantly because he didn’t have any clothes to begin with.

Cats don’t like to wear clothes. They find them very restricting, particularly when they’re trying to pee. Dogs, on the the other hand, love to dress up in fancy outfits. But don’t give them anything that you might want to wear again, because they’ll get dog hairs and crumbs all over it and you’ll have to take it to the dry cleaners and you might accidentally leave a fifty euro bill in the shirt pocket and it’ll get destroyed in the cleaning process and then you’ll be fifty euro short for the rest of the week and you won’t be able to afford any popcorn when you go to the cinema and you’ll be starving by the time you get home, so much so that you’ll eat the mouldy bread that’s in the cupboard beside the damp patch where you spat a few days ago when you couldn’t get to the spit-bucket in time, and you’ll get food poisoning and end up sharing a hospital ward with somebody who isn’t afraid to steal sweets, and then you’ll have to testify in court or possibly on the Judge Judy show and you’ll be a national celebrity and you won’t ever have any privacy again, at least for three days and during re-runs, and you’ll become a pale shadow of your former self, who hangs around in bars waiting for the price of beer to collapse, and let me tell you you’ll be waiting a hell of a long time, given the current economic climate.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.