And so it is that the conclave of cardinals has baffled the members of the Roman Catholic church by choosing a staunch proponent of Roman Catholicism to lead them. 

I must say I am fascinated by the reaction. What the hell did you people think was meant by the phrase “Is the pope catholic?” He is. That’s his job.  It’s a bit like that old question; “does a bear shit in the woods?” We all do it, us bears, and you’re supposed to know that. Hence when someone asks you whether a bear shits in the woods, it is assumed that you know the answer to be yes, and it’s taken to be a rhetorical question to make you look like the stupid dumbass that you apparently are.

No offence.

That’s not to say of course that we bears are uncivilized animals. We have toilets in the wood. They are indoor toilets, with hand wash basins and mats and the full works, but that does not mean they aren’t in the wood. I think that confuses people sometimes.

The last pope in fact wanted to shit on the tarmac at every airport he visited, but Cardinal Ratzinger, not one for big gestures, gently persuaded him that a simple kissing of the ground would be more appropriate. He then explained that the pope  / catholic thing and the bear / woods thing were not interchangeable, and advised Pope John Paul II not to mess with things that had been “laid” down”, so to speak, by his god..

And that brings me to my point.

Staunch catholics maintain that church policy on age-old issues such as non-ordination of women and condemnation of various “evils” cannot be changed because they were laid down by God countless millennia ago. But tarmac hadn’t been invented when god wrote the bible, so he must have brought in that new rule (the one that says the pope shouldn’t shit on the runway at airports) relatively recently. If he can bring in new judgments on runways and things, then obviously he would, if he felt it appropriate, come back and update his teachings on all the old stuff. He hasn’t, so clearly he wants things left as they are.

In other words, he wants the pope to continue to shit in the woods and not take crap from anyone else.Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking “What the hell does a bear know about major issues of theology?” And that’s an excellent question. Pity you were too much of a pussy to ask it out loud.

Well, the answer is nothing. I’m just a bear. I eat marmalade, look cute and sit on Neal’s bed or in the attic. That’s why we bears are not allowed to become priests in the Roman Catholic Church. Most of us end up joining a cult instead. It’s much easier to get to the top, and the rewards are far greater, unless of course it’s somebody else’s cult. Never ever join somebody else’s cult. You’ll be waiting ages for a promotion and the chances are you won’t get there without committing some sort of a coup.

Coups are a pain in the ass. You end up remortgaging your house to pay for the guns and the after-coup party, and there’s a shitload of paperwork involved if you are actually successful. If you stage a successful coup to take over a country, for example, you have to write a whole bloody constitution. Call me a lazy bastard, but that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

The point is Cardinal Singed-rat is right about everything. The problem is that there are millions of people in the church who shouldn’t be there, because they don’t agree with the teachings of it’s founders. Now, if this was a yacht club or a pigeon fanciers’ society, someone could just move a motion (not literally of course, unless you’re the pope and you’re on the tarmac) to change the rules to whatever fitted the current fashion. But it don’t work like that. God has apparently made clear his unchangeable policy  that women and homosexuals are scum, so no matter how much you may hate that view, as I do, he has to be obeyed.

Cos he’s God.

He’s not some asshole who walked in from the street and declared himself the Supreme Being. He made the fucking streets. He made the tarmac that’s in the middle of the streets, and he made the dope that gets sold in them. God bless him. And what thanks does he get? You bastards put his son up on a goddam tree and leave him there until he’s dead.

Then the poor bastard comes along every few years and puts a representative on earth, as chosen by his cardinals under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and all you can do is whine that his pope causes AIDS in Africa. Yeah well at least with AIDS you don’t get nails driven through your hands and a crown of thorns on your goddam head.

Stop whining you assholes. At least you get to shit indoors. I’m Bowsy the bear, for MatchstickCats-NewsBurp,  and you haven’t heard the last of me, godammit.

More Bowsy

The one thing I miss about that week when there was a dog temporarily residing in this house, is the many minutes I whiled away talking to it.

You know – things like “Hello dog. You’re a dog, you are. That’s right. A dog. Aren’t you?” It’s always nice to be so certain about a fact, to the point that you are virtually infallible. That’s why you humans, despite all of your sophisticated modern knowledge and technologies, still resort to comfortable old phrases like “Let’s call a spade a spade”. Y

You take great comfort in the fact that no matter what, there is always a garden implement tucked away in your garden shed with which you can relax and converse in the comfort of one hundred percent certainty as to it’s true identity.

How often does that happen in your day to day life? Can you be sure that the person who stands behind the supermarket checkout and takes your money is a genuine employee of the store, and not a confidence trickster who’s spotted an empty checkout and is chancing his arm?

Can you really be confident that those people in your house – allegedly your spouse and children – are the people they claim to be? Don’t forget, just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get you.

On the other hand, why would they be out to get you, of all people? It’s not as if you’re a precious commodity. There’s six god dam billion of you now, and humans are three a penny. Frankly if I had the whole of Earth’s human populatoion to choose from, I’d avoid the two dozen who were mentally deficient to the point of paranoia and instead cherry pick the best.

Not that a cherry is much of an analogy for a top quality human. The only humans who are red are the ones who choose to sit under a tanning bed for longer than the recommended time. You don’t want those.

That reminds me. Why does the tanning bed never get burnt?

Not that I require a reply, you understand. I merely ask the question in order to showcase my unique observational talents. Or rather, not quite unique, sense several thousand other bears are equally equipped.

I’m sure you wouldn’t quite see it that way if it was you though. Being a human, your survival instincts cause you to believe that you are so unique and important to the world that it must have you. In my case of course, it’s true. In yours however, it is not. Don’t take it personally, it’s just that you’re an ordinary, two legged snotty human being, one of six billion of same, and I’m a talking teddy bear. There’s just no competition.

And to think, you people have spent the last ten years trying to figure out whether it’s okay to clone yourselves.

Even better, many of you thought it was disgusting when they cloned Dolly the sheep. Oh my god – if that sort of thing is allowed to go on, we’ll have a load of sheep who all look exactly the same. Wherever will it end? We must stop these crackpots who want to create identical sheep.

Meanwhile, toy factories are gurgitating copies of me every day, faster than they can churn out five Euro picture postcards of Benedict VIV to flog in the Vatican car park.

And in conclusion, did I mention that you’re an idiot?

More Bowsy

As I sit here contemplating the issues that affect all of us (Well, the issues that affect me, anyway. If they happen to coincide with your problems, that’s just good luck on your part that you get to bask in the shining radiance of my wisdom. I’m not trying to help) it occurs to me that many of the bad tidings that are brought to us in this stinking life, are the result not of our own actions or those of others, but of minute changes in the positioning of the stars that were in view the day we were born.

Astrology, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t taken anywhere near seriously enough. I’m convinced that if we sent Bruce Willis up on a self-sacrificing mission to destroy the asteroid that’s currently obscuring the Capricorn nebula under whose sky I was born, my life would instantly be the better for it.

Ditto Michael Keaton. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people with weird permanently inquisitive eyebrows. Admittedly my face is entirely covered in hair and in theory if you shaved the right bits of it away, you would be left with a weird eyebrow. However, that’s not going to happen, and if any asshole tries to shave me they’ll soon find out about the full moon and why it shines bright red after I kick the crap out of it.

As I was saying to Rush Limbaugh the other day, there is not enough corporal punishment in this world. If someone’s ass needs kicking you are doing them a service by kicking it, and possibly preventing them from falling into a spiral of crime and deviation into which they would otherwise tumble.

I myself was thrown around the room by both Neal and his father as they shouted “Flying lessons, Bowsy” when I was younger, and I’m all the better for it. In fact, I believe another few trips and I would now be able to fly. Those bastards stopped as soon as they realised I was learning a new skill that could release me from my domestic slavery and allow me to see the world.

Of course, nowadays I have the advantage of being old, which means it is expected of me that I am grumpy and cranky. This is a wonderful development, and I use it to my great advantage.

Just yesterday I gave out stink to a milkman for false advertising. His sign claimed that the milk was 98% fat free, and I pointed none of the milk was fat free.  I maintained that every single drop of the milk, all one hundred percent of it, contained 2% fat.

You can’t let these people walk all over you. If you do, your stuffing gets squeezed down to your legs and you end up having your chest opened and an old windscreen cloth and half of Neal’s pyjamas get inserted permanently into your chestal cavity.

Then you get roped in to write crap for some damn website that he’s got, and have to listen to the likes of Elfy insulting you in the guestbook. Oh dear, I seem to have strayed from the topic. Wonder where I picked that habit up from.

Anyway, there’s a little known system of belief followed by some people, that they are the only person in the Universe and everyone else is just a figment of their imagination, put there for their entertainment and stimulation. Apparently this has been the reason given for the actions of some or the great serial killers. Or at least by the fictional one-time alleged murderer featured on British television police soap “The Bill” last night, but I’ve used poetic license and trajectory and decided it happens all the time. Sue me. Anyhoo, my own belief is the complete opposite, as I will explain.

I am convinced that everybody in the whole universe is real, except me.

My theory is that I am a figment of your imagination, created for your entertainment and / or stimulation. The evidence backs it up:

How many bears do you know who can write a five hundred word article in two sittings of fifteen minutes each? Very few I suggest.  In reality, most bears are barely able to string a sentence together without making a fatal grammatical error and becoming misunderstood.

The upshot of all this is that if I am a figment of your imagination, it follows that everything I say has come from your mind, not mine.

In other words, all of the opinions expressed on this page are yours. Every single one of them

Well replace my stuffing with cat’s vomit if it isn’t almost Summer again.

For those who don’t know, that’s the season when every goddam asshole apparantly feels an irrisistible urge to strip half naked and expose their armits and hairy backs for all the world to see. This despite years of warnings from the medical world that if you sit under the sun all day you’re going to die a long, slow painful death and not only that, you’ll be hideously ugly too.

You humans really aren’t the brightest crayons in the packet, are you. You’ll notice I haven’t added a question mark there.

Anyhoo, yesterday there I was watching Columbo,  when during the commericials one of those road safety adverts popped up. You know them – the ones that feature a driver and passengers getting ripped to pieces by their own windscreen because the gobshite in the front hasn’t been paying attention, or some such thing. Apparently you losers can’t just be told “don’t speed, it’s a bit dangerous”.

Oh no.

You don’t believe anything until the government hires a shitload of actors and a director to play out the scenario for you. You even expect them to wreck a real car in the process. Then you might start to listen.

Maybe. If you’re not too busy pouring gallons of pure alcohol down your greedy gullet in an attempt to make your friends look more interesting.

That’s why anti smoking campaigns don’t work. You’re just not going to listen until they wheel out John Wayne’s ghost and  he rips out his lungs for you to have a good close up look at. Then you might consider cutting back.

They try making it easy for you. They even paint a couple of  thick white lines across the road for you to cross between, and another line for the cars to wait behind until the big luminious set of lights changes to green. In Ireland they add in a ramp at each side of the road and cover it in a tactile surface so even people who can’t see can find where the designated safe crossing area is.

Meanwhile, you’re thirty yards down the street, staggering across the road in an untidy diagonal, passing right in front of a forty foot truck as you make an ultra important call on your telephone, which you make sure to press hard against your head while we await conclusive proof of their safety, maybe reading the latest Stephen King about a family who’s being haunted by the revengeful pedestrian who they ran over and killed.

We do these things a little differently in the bear world.

Allow me to explain, using an easy to understand example. Put your hand up if you’ve got any questions, and I’ll bite it off for you.

Let’s say. I’m in the woods. In actual fact I’m not. I’m flung on the floor of the spare room while that asshole downstairs writes this crap in my name. Anyway, say I’m in the woods and my friend Ullysses, that cheap bastard who Neal got in a supermarket with a few tokens and an old Irish five pound note,  is walking ahead of me.

And all of a sudden I hear a high pitched “yelp”, followed by a scream, in that unmistakeably stupid voice that I know to belong to Ullysses. What do I do? Well of course I carry on the same route that Ully took and hope for the best.

Well I do if I’m a human

But being a member of a more thought-driven species, I slow down and assess the situation, and carefully check whether my companion has come to any danger, and if it turns out that he’s been shot to pieces by a drug-crazed deer hunter who’s had a bad day, then I consider the possiblity of maybe giving some thought to whether or not it might be advisable to take a different route.

It’s that simple, humanity. If a tenth of your population is dying of lung cancer, think about not smoking so much. If there’s a load of people getting killed by speeding on the roads every weekend, consider slowing down. And if your entire family have died a long, slow painful death as a result of sitting in the sun all day, I’d perhaps think about maybe putting on a shirt on the beach when it’ reaches, say, a  hundred degress celcius. Just for the sake of reducing your theoretical odds, or whatever.

Personally, I think the Road Runner said it best when he said “meep meep”, then flew off down the mountain road at breakneck speed to avoid having his neck broken by a bloodthirsty coyote. Not that that’s going to happen to any of you, but if you’ve got even half an imagination you’ll adapt the tale to fit into your daily lives.

Say for example that the coyote is a Nissan Micra and the Road Runner is…I dunno…you, and the mountain road is a pavement outside your house that’s very slippy because you have failed to live up to your legal responsibility to keep it free of ice.

Now let’s say the Nissan Micra notices that you’ve got an Acme brand bowling ball shaped bomb hidden under your fur, so it slows to five miles an hour to delay it’s approach so that, by the time the Nissan reaches you, you’ve been blown to smithereens.

Now lets say there’s no moral to that story, and that I just made it up because I enjoy the thought of you being blown up.

And let’s say you’re reading this sentence, gripped by every word that passes into your ears and astounded at the profundity, truth and wisdom that eminates from it’s author, and wondering what the bear is going to come out with next. Now let’s say you’re an asshole.

More Bowsy

From 2006, Bowsy chimes in on the contraversial Matchstick Cats G’N’R New Tracks Specials, found here.

So here’s how it went down.

As far as I can ascertain using my limited investigative powers as an inanimate bear, somebody posted in a couple of GNR forums on the Internet on Saturday, declaring that this site would shortly be presenting the two “Matchstick Cats GNR brand new tracks specials”.

Unfortunately due to an oversight the chosen  sites turned out not to be websites devoted to enthusiasts of the Great Northern Railways, but in fact were fan sites of the rock band “Guns’n’Roses”.

By late afternoon the announcement was quoted in dedicated sections of at least two major websites that devote themselves to proving or debunking rumours.  The rumour spread like wildfire through that wonderful network of humans known as the World Wide Web. Soon the world’s rock fans were converging in their 1200s on this humble corner of the Internet, the more vocal among them making their disappointment felt very articulately, although unfortunately not always in English, in the guestbook

Apparently, the expected normal release process for new music nowadays is through tiny cat comic websites run off a laptop in Ireland. My god, the music industry has changed. In my day, you had to buy a bulky scratchy old gramophone record, which you ordered by telegram from Amazon.com, then collected from their store a couple of weeks later.

Not that I have much interest in this hard rock stuff, you understand. Personally, I much prefer to relax with a copy of Hayden’s trumpet concerto in D minor. But you have to give the young kids what they want. And I have to admit, I do have a soft spot for W’axl Rose, ever since he stood on stage with his colleague Elton John and gave a beautiful rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, with a tear in his eye and a heavy heart at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert.

Little wonder that such a mind could also give us the operatic emotion of the wedding death scene in the November Rain video. It is a work of such devastating profundity that I invariably piss my fur while viewing it.

The audience is left in tears as the best man, played (ironically, given the urinatical effect) by “Slash”, unable to participate in the ceremony because of height restrictions and not realising that he could just take off his top hat, is left outside the chapel with nothing to entertain himself but his trusty old guitar.

Sadly, it has been some time since G’N’F’N’R  have released any new material, and many of the original members have dispersed to occupy themselves elsewhere.

Hence the need for websites like this to fill the void with our Matchstick Cats Brand New Tracks Specials. Think of us as a sort of cover band, without any members, musicianship skills, or intention of releasing anything in the immediate fut-

-Never mind.

Anyhoo, the upshot of it all is that it is almost as if this whole thing is an illusion of some kind. And if there’s one thing that our heroes have taught us, it is that you must “Use your illusion” to the full extent of it’s capabilities.

Personally my favourite involves pulling a top hat out of a rabbit’s ass, then stuffing it back in again. Everybody knows of course that it’s not a real hat. But who’s going to tell the rabbit that? And is it going to care? Rabbits are not the type who turn down the possibility of having something stuffed up them, and who can blame them. They live a horrible life, cooped up in their little rabbit ghettos with the several hundred children running around and causing all sorts of rumpus.

You’d think that an animal that is born equipped with no less than four rabbit’s feet, would have a lot more luck than that.

But I digress.

At this stage, many of you may be wondering what you’re doing reading an article by a stupid brown bear on the other side of the world. That probably means you’re racist. But I won’t hold that against you.

I’ve spent too much of my life trying to tackle the prejudices that face soft toys, and I’m fucked if I’m going to waste any more of it listening to you. Loser.

No offence.

Anyway, what I brought you here to talk to you about today was the whole thing about picnic baskets and bears who allegedly steal them. First off, if my parents had named me Yogi or Booboo, I’d most likely have grown up a delinquent too.

But that’s beside the point, which is that “Picnic basket” is far too generic a term to cover the wide range of items which are available to pilfer in a natural park. It is an over simplification.

And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s this kind of “dumbing down” in the media. That phrase is itself a dumbing down, as it misuses a word that is meant to refer to an inability to communicate orally, rather than a lack of intellectual content.

And what the hell the word “dumbass” is supposed to mean these days, I can only guess. But let’s not make fun of innocent body parts which, apparently, can’t answer us back. As an inanimate object myself, I often find myself the object of ridicule by the “alive” community. I try not to let it get the better of me, but sometimes it does piss me off quite immensely.

Not that I have the ability to urinate, of course, but people do love to assign imaginary human characteristics to their pets or soft toys. Accordingly, it has been “determined” that I urinate. Interestingly I manage to do it in a way that involves no mess or inconvenience. I must be immensely talented in that way.

Anyway the thing about Hanna Barbara cartoons, I find, is that all of the bears without exception look like hound dogs. I for one would not allow myself to be seen associating with these hideous hibreed animals. Not that I’m a snob, you understand, but I have my standards. And in my humble opinion, Scooby Doo is scum.

Personally, I was always more of a fan of Bugs Bunny, who would fight off his adversaries with impressive quips and put-downs, mixed with the occasional confidence trick. That’s the sort of thing I go in for. I’m also a big fan of opera and religious art, but I realise that you people are nowhere near capable of reading a dissertation on those subjects, so I will do you a favour and leave it at that.

Instead, I, Bowsy the Bear, will cowtow to your low-brow entertainment needs, fill the rest of this piece with swear words and cheap vulgarities and leave you with this thought. Which of these is the odd one out? Fuck, arse, shite, urine, the late Michael Landon from Little House on the Prairie, vomit, toilet

More Bowsy