Category: Writings

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.

A substandard Into Your Head podcast Blog or something from whenever.

The Australian music artiste Kylie Minogue said it best, I think, when she said “Cast not a clout for he for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. And unless I’m greatly mistaken, thee are a “she”, not a “he”. So let’s be accurate here”.

In a way, I suppose we all have our own individual bells tolling for us. Mine is operated by the Hunchback of Notre Dame, who chimes it every twelve hours, or sometimes at pre-arranged extra times, from his majestic bell tower in Paris.

Of course it isn’t really his, but he does live there and therefore derives much personal enjoyment from his job. I’ve been trying to find some way of deducting this from his wages as “benefit in kind”, but alas to no avail.

I’ve always had a major problem with my avails. I think it’s because I’m not from a seafaring family. We have always preferred to travel by land, no matter what the consequences. This can be an awful nuisance when travelling overseas, as we have to drive along the ocean floor in a submarine, and we get seahorses and things all over the windscreen.

Not that I have anything against seahorses, you understand. It’s just that I’ve never appreciated their obsession with remaining wet all the time, while their land cousins are happy to run about in a dry wind and risk breaking their legs and being put down, all in the interests of having fun. That’s what’s missing from today’s exotic sea creatures, you know. No sense of fun.

Just yesterday I performed an (admittedly unrehearsed) trampoline act for a group of them at my local aquarium, and not one of them could be bothered even to applaud.

Not that I do these things for applause, you understand. No. I do them for money. I find that money is a much more liquid asset than recognition, and it comes in especially useful when you’re hungry. I prefer not to spend money. I consider that to be rather common and vulgar.

Instead I have joined a local barter system, where we exchange assets such as cash or chequebooks for other assets such as food and clothes. For example, I might have a collection of one Euro coins, which I would “barter” for a couple of pints of milk. It works much better than simply buying things.

You know, there’s a lot to be said for the way things used to be done. In the old days, if you wanted to light a fire you didn’t have to go out and buy matches. Instead you simply got a couple of old matchsticks and rubbed them together until they started to burn. Then you used the resulting heat to power a small portable matchstick factory  producing, at it’s peak, a couple of hundred boxes of matches a day.

Of course nowadays the politically correct anti smoking lobby is at the throats of the small matchstick producer. Many of us have had to diversify and instead of making fire we now convert our matchsticks into crude drawings and hangman games and the like.

But that’s not the point.

You are greatly mistaken if you think it is. Unless I’ve got this all wrong and you are right, in which case my humble apologies to you and to all of your family who must feel greatly humiliated. I really am most dreadfully awfully sorry for all of the pain and distress that I must have caused you.

Anyway, two cats break into a matchstick factory. One of the cats smells bacon and immediately hides behind the cafeteria door, because if there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s roasted pig.

The other cat notices a policeman nearby, who appears to be rather deviously roasting a pig on a spit, in order to scare into hiding any cats who might be trying to break in to the factory. This approach, which has been adopted by the police in recent years has of course got it’s advantages and disadvantages.

On one paw it prevents cats from going ahead with such robberies. On the other, it scares them into hiding so there is no chance of them being caught red-handed, not least because they don’t have hands.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the end.

An IYH Podcast blog from 2012

If there’s one sentence by which I live my life, it is “Espedianta eluminum agraphobia”. I swear by it, and thereby cause quite a great deal of offence to those for whom it forms the basis of a religion.

Here in Ireland , it’s now once again illegal to blaspheme, because apparently god has a bit of a fragile ego and we don’t want to offend him. This legal thing though, is a bit of a problem.

Those of you who frequented my old websites will know that I once hired god to do an occasional article, and in it he made frequent references to his late son, Jesus Christ. Each time he did this, I had to issue a formal warning to him for taking his son’s name in vein. The people who write these laws really need to tighten things up a bit.

I recently had a go at writing some legislation, and it was surprisingly easy. I composed a flawless bill that, if passed, would outlaw the use of the symbol @ in inappropriate places, such as cinemas and night clubs. It was so easy I ended up adding one of my old “two cats walk into a bar” stories, from the pre-podcasting days, as section four, subsection three.

It stands very little chance of getting passed of course, since I am not a member of any legislative body. I’ve never held any great ambitions toward politics. I’d far rather continue in my current role as part time househusband, full time podcaster, or failing that become an astronaut.

I’ve always admired astronauts, with their ability to live for several months without going to the toilet. They put camels and llamas to shame. You wouldn’t see an astronaut going round with an unsightly hump on his back, yet they still get the job done.

That hunchback in Notre Dame feels the same way, I’m sure. Not that I’ve asked him. I really have no right to be putting words into people’s mouths, but on the other hand he can’t speak very well, and somebody has to act as interpreter. And since I have something to say, it may as well be me. So anyway, the hunchback of Notre Dame says “Hi”.

Personally I think the (now deceased) Australian guy who does that crocodile thing on the television, said it best when he said “Laugh not at those for whom the bell toll. It tolls for thee”. Well, I’d certainly go along with that. I’ve never found bells to be very funny at all. They just repeat the same old line over and over and over again, and we’re supposed to laugh every time.

It’s so repetitive. Anyway, two cats walk into a bar. One of them asks for a “Jesus is an asshole” cocktail, and promptly gets arrested for blasphemy. And quite rightly if you ask me. The other cat, on seeing his friend being dragged away in handcuffs, exclaims “Jesus Christ”, whereupon somebody taps him on the shoulder and whispers in the ear, “Yes, but if you don’t mind, it’s my day off and I’d rather not have the autograph hunters and things breathing down my neck. And if I have to do that loaves and fishes thing one more time, I swear to god I’ll kill myself, and not rise for at least five days. Besides, I still haven’t paid the fine for my last miracle, when I produced a couple of buckets of wine without the appropriate liquor licenses.

So the other cat replies, “Well, nice to meet you anyway. Can I buy you a damp spong- …oh..sorry. Didn’t mean to be insensitive”

Some emergency facts for when you cannot access Wikipedia, which we’re pretending was a real concern at time of writing, 2012.

• It would be highly unusual, in their natural habitat and especially at night, for cats to arrange their eyes in straight lines along the centre of a road.
  
  
• Based on the complete absence of any archaeological remains, historians believe igloos were only invented three months ago.
  
  
• If you turn a transparent glass clock upside down and back to front, then make it run counter clockwise, it is rendered useless.
  
  
• A human colon, laid out in a field, could distribute fertiliser and water to an acre of crops. Hence the term “colonic irrigation”.
  
• Contrary to popular misunderstanding, chicken coups are rare, and poultry farmers almost always manage to overpower the instigator.
  
  
• In theory, if you built a large enough floodlight to illuminate the dark side of the moon, it could no longer accurately be called that.
  
  
• Archaeologists studying prehistoric cave drawings have observed that the symbols used for “elbow” and “arse” are practically identical.
  
  
• The phrase “letting off steam” refers to the tendency of medical researchers to concentrate on the dangers of smoke inhalation, while (unfairly, some would argue) ignoring the dangers of steam.
  
  
• Unlike their human counterparts, glove puppets and sock puppets are pretty much interchangeable.
  
  

In the nineteen seventies the first carrier pigeons took off from my home town and made their way across the Irish sea to England.

They were carrying a shipment of carrier pigeons to a would-be pigeon breeder, who wanted to stop being a would-be pigeon breeder and a be a real pigeon breeder instead, so he’d decided to go ahead and breed pigeons.

He didn’t do the actual breeding himself. He hired a male carrier pigeon to do that for him. In those days it was considered inappropriate for the a human to mate with a carrier pigeon. The seventies were a time of great conservatism and restriction of freedoms in my country. Although I’ve just realised that doesn’t make sense because this would-be pigeon breeder guy is supposed to be in England. Dammit.

Okay let’s pretend that my home town, wherefrom the pigeons took off, is in Northern Ireland not the Republic, and that’s (officially, technically, and don’t shoot the messenger (literally or figuratievely)) in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as is England, so that works I think

It was not until the mid nineteen eighties that it became legal to be adopted by h a carrier pigeon here in Irel-I mean Northern Ireland, and even then it was generally accepted that you were only allowed to be pen pals, and no more. As a child I was once paired, by my school, with with a pen-pal from Pensyllvania in America.  I think people in Pensyllvania feel obliged to write to somebody because the name of their state derives from the word “pencil,” and also because they go to a school that has some sort of arrangment with a school in Irland.

Anyway I’m not going to tell you any more about that, in case my rambling is making you angry and red faced, and you end up being mistaken for a nicely ripened tomatoe by an over enthusiastic sandwich maker who proceeds to chop you up and sprinkle you with a selection of green herbs and spices which tickle your nose and make you want to sneeze and sneeze and sneeze all day every day for the rest of your life or at least until Family Guy comes on and you’ve satisfied yourself that it’s not a rerun, or at least that you haven’t seen that episode before.

Don’t forget that now that you are a tomatoe, you will have a much lower life expectancy that you did as a human. Tomatoes rarely live past their sixth month. They become victim to crimes of passion or else they get made into a pizza. I can never remember which.

I was talking to a cucumber enthusiast the other day and he pointed out to me, in a very convincing and rather frightening tone, that cucumbers are significantly more resiliant than tomatoes, and even they don’t live very long. 

And I had to agree. I bought a cucumber recently that was wrapped in tough cellophane and already it’s gone soft and wrinkly and I’m not completely sure that I want to eat it anymore.

Admitedly it’s past it’s sell-by date and I have to admit that I have not yet sold it. The market is slow these days and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find someone who is currently living in a slightly smaller one and wants to move up the property ladder.

People who are cucumber enthusiasts generally find it hard to get mortgages, I’ve always found. This is because the banks realise that these people care so much about cucumbers that they will never eat them, and that therefore they are not eating enough vegetables and are likely to run into ill health before the end of their mortgage term.

The anti-cucumber lobby, on the other hand, receive more loan approvals than they can handle Mark my words, a couple of decades from now there’s going to be a lot of green juice on the faces of these bank managers when they discover that their customers can’t pay back the money they borrowed for their houses or cucumbers or whatever I’m supposed to be talking about.

I’m sorry but I haven’t had any porridge this morning and am finding it hard to follow my train of thought to it’s logical conclusion. The train has apparently buckled and somehow ended up on that other piece of unused track that you let your dog pee on when you go for a walk because you assume that it’s too old to be electrified.

Don’t worry, your dog will be fine.

Dogs like electricity. They lap it up the same way that a cat laps up milk. Strangely enough, electric power is surprising low in both energy and vitamins. Your dog is pretty much eating empty calories. Why don’t you just buy some canned stuff like everybody else?

A blog post from 2011, “enhanced” in 2012

Well, that time of year has passed again, and here we are, all stuffed full of turkey and poitín, wondering what to do with the leftovers. 

 I have a system to which I have stuck rigidly throughout the years. If the turkey was good and tasty, and all of the guests enjoyed it, I reward it the day after Christmas Day by letting it live, and setting it free to roam the world and seek it’s fortune, walking off down the road with all of its earthly possessions wrapped in a bag on the end of a stick, just like Puss in Boots.

IIncidentally, this is the only paragraph in this article that was not written years in advance of the current movie Puss in Boots, which my wife and I saw yesterday. I think the me of the early 2000s may have been a clairvoyant or something.

QUICK RECIPE: For the perfect hot chicken sandwich: Season with salt, bring to the boil, simmer for three to five minutes, then remove shell and serve on toast.

If, however, the bird was unpalatable, I beat it to within an inch of it’s life, and force it to apologise for embarrassing me in front of my hungry friends and loved ones, after I very kindly gave it a warm home for Christmas. Then I drive it back to the ghettos from whence it came, and kick it out of the car, just like Danny DeVito in “Changing Places”.

I tell it to warn it’s friends never to cross my path, unless they happen to be black cats. I also send it a bill for the sauce that we had to use to disguise it’s taste. You cannot let these birds walk all over you. Otherwise they w-

-I’ve just noticed that the spell checker is suggesting that I not apostrophise the word “it’s”. Well, I must say, that has put me in foul humour. No, not “humor”, you electronic asshole. I live in Europe , where we use proper English. No offence.

Although of course I’m in Ireland , agus ba fhearr liom scriobh as Gailge, mar sin. But I’m willing to concede to those of you who have failed to become proficient in my country’s beautiful ancestral tongue. Anyway, two cats walk into a sandwich bar.

One of them asks the young woman behind the counter for a tongue sandwich, and promptly gets kicked out of the store The other, seeing his chance, asks her out to the cinema. The following day, Neil Armstrong lands on the moon and utters the immortal phrase “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask whether you really want to live in a country so small that right now I can hold it between my forefinger and thumb. Although admittedly I am on the moon, looking at the earth from a great distance, and suffering the hallucinogenic effects of eating lunar cheese in massive quantities. Cheap bastards didn’t pack me a lunchbox. Are we recording yet? These audio-cassette things will never take off. Christ I wish I could have a proper, non-vacuumed shit right now”.

QUICK RECIPE: To prepare tortoise eggs: Salt lightly, place in boiling water, simmer for five minutes, then remove shell and cut open to find perfectly cooked eggs.

And in a way, I suppose that sums up what this season has meant to those of us who start a sentence without having any idea how it’s going to end. And since the next sentence is no longer relevant, it’s been deleted and the rest of this is pretty much filler, and the next bit will seem out of place and irrelevant. Not least because I am drunk to the very bottom or my soul with that rich and wonderful thing that has been brought to me these past few months. Carlsberg. Ten cans for €10 at my local Centra, most bank holiday weekends.

A useful tip for poaching eggs: Placing some balls of white paper in the nest buys you some time to escape unnoticed.

I’ve always liked seeming out of place. Frequently I walk up to drive-through restaurants, just for the sheer hell of it. I usually order the unhealthiest item on the menu, and ironically “power walk” my way home while eating a double cheese thing and cramming French-fried potatoes down my greedy throat.

Okay I’m done.

It’s that time of year again, when cigarette manufacturers cynically launch their iced cigarettes on a sweltering public.

At the other end of the spectrum, the tree huggers remind us that this is the season when we should be saving as much sunlight as possible to power our homes and cars, rather than selfishly tanning ourselves in our back gardens. Meanwhile, Pope Benedict has completed his review of the state of Limbo dancing, and mysteriously concluded that it should not be abolished.

I cannot accept that the above are not all connected in some way. For one thing they’re together in a single paragraph (or were, until a 2024 revision). If there’s one thing the education system has taught me, it’s that a paragraph is a self-contained discussion of a sub-topic within an essay. If there’s two things it’s taught me, they are: (1) That a paragraph is a self-contained discussion of a sub-topic within an essay, and (2) something else. It’s similar to the way in which the domestic cat is a sub-group within the extended cat family. If I came across my cat Hairy mingling with a sabre-toothed tiger at Dublin Zoo, I would immediately think that one or other of them were out of place.

That’s not to say that the modern day Zoologist is particularly challenged when trying to differentiate between those particular cousins. The domesticated cat is very rarely seen in these places, except in countries where there are no domesticated cats in the wild, and people come to the zoo hoping to see one for the very first time. In these countries of course, a house cat is “speed-evolved” from the indigenous tigers or lions, so that locals can see what a genuine native housecat would be like, were it to actually exist in the wild locally.

The speed evolving process is fascinating, I’m sure, but I know nothing about it. I’m quite sure though that if you go to Wikipedia you’ll be able to find information about it. If you can’t, don’t be shy about going making something up yourself. That’s how Wikipedia works, after all. Be sure to quote this article as a source though. They’re very fussy about citing sources over there. I’ll go ahead and name Wikipedia as the source for this article, just for tidiness.*

The book of the cult British television sit-com “Red Dwarf” asserts that a cat, if left alone in the basement of a spacecraft for a million years, will evolve into a very selfish and self-obsessed humanoid creature who likes tuna. Obviously this is an appalling stereotype, and I made up the bit about the tuna. However, I did this for a reason. I cannot, under current copyright laws, simply recount a story that someone else has already told elsewhere, no more that I can legally perform an exact copy of the Bob Dylan song “Buckets of Rain”, by growing a clone of his voice box and having it transplanted into my body, and instructing my band to learn to perfectly duplicate every note of the performance. That would be stealing.

However, I am perfectly entitled to perform a “skit” of an original piece of work, by adding a bit about tuna to make it obvious that my version is a ridiculous spoof. And that’s what I’ve done here. The beauty of the whole scheme is that my “tuna” bit appears to fit naturally into the story, and only the most widely-read among you will have spotted that it was my own addition.

Of course, the whole cats-liking-tuna thing is a popular but unfounded myth, the beginnings of which lie in the similarities between dolphins and cats, of which there are very few. In a nutshell, they both have whiskers. It certainly is funny that such an untruth could spread so widely through the cat owning population. Luckily, cats have over time grown to like the fish, and it has turned into one of those self-perpetuating myths.

Incidentally, I’ve always wanted to start a myth about moths. The opportunities for alliteration would be almost endless. Sadly though, spreading a rumour through the population is not as simple as that. Take for example the fact that Michael J. Fox caught his unfortunate illness from spending too much time in a rocking chair in his youth. Clearly nobody would believe this, because young people are supposedly “known” to be averse to rocking chairs. But has this ever been proven? Has there ever been an article in “Scientific American” setting out the results of a study of the recreational sitting habits of our young children?

Frankly, I don’t know.

An Into Your Head podcast blog post From 2007

Circa Spring 2006

The glaring differences between the Octopus and it’s humble land-living cousin, the domestic two legged cat, have always fascinated me. I think they are a perfect example of how the adult self is formed by nurture, not nature. Put an animal on land, where it has almost unlimited access to old ladies who’ll feed them cow’s milk at least daily, and place it’s cousin in the sea, where there is absolutely no access whatsoever to dairy products, and watch what happens.

The sea-dwelling pus grows no less than four extra legs. It begs the question, why on earth do we listen to nutritionists when they tell us that milk is necessary for a sufficient supply of calcium to keep our skeletons healthy? Let me clear this alleged scientific fact up once and for all in a simple table.

Species	Daily Milk Intake (pints)	No. of Legs	Leg:Body Ratio
Domestic Cat (Land pus)	2*	4	4:1
Octupus	0	8	8:1
.
(*source: my left ventricle)

I think we can see clearly that milk is very bad for your bones. Besides which, milk comes out of a cow’s ass and is full of crap. If you must consume a beverage that is sourced from an animal’s ass, at least select a species that has high standards of hygiene.

A cat, for example.

Personally, I think the Vegans are the only people who’ve got it right. In Vegania, they had a war several years ago that wiped out all but the most aggressive of animals. And ever since, Vegans have been afraid of the remaining farm animals, so they just let them be. Frankly, they’re a bunch of pussies, but they’ve got beautiful creamy skin and their bowel movements are as regular as clockwork.

I’ve always believed it was important to have well-disciplined digestive organs. You can’t have a situation whereby your ass just lets loose whenever it feels like it. Especially if you’re about to buy a lovely new house and plan on putting a lot of nice new furniture in it.

So I’m thinking I might cut down on my fibre intake, and eat less carpet. That’s why we’ve decided to get either tiles or wooden floor-coverings in all of the rooms. Wood is natural stuff from trees, so it’s pretty much a vegetable, and I don’t know what tiles are made of but I’m almost certain they don’t come out of a cow’s ass, because they’ve got very sharp edges. That’s why I’ve never understood the attraction with Toblerones. Or tortilla chips, for that matter.

Give me a nice round, smooth apple or orange any day, and I’ll give you some nice, harmless pain free brown liquidy stuff. I love making smoothies. Besides, where the hell are you going to find vitamin “C” in a piece of cow excrement? Don’t kid yourself – any cow that has been intelligent enough to eat oranges all it’s life, sure as hell isn’t going to allow itself to end up in an abattoir.

Although as I write that, it occurs to me that I used to live in a housing estate called Applewood Heights, and there was an abattoir at the bottom of the road. And there were no apples left. Apparently they were all used up a long time ago.

Now, I’m not sure whether that proves or disproves my theory about cows and vitamin “C”, but it says a hell of a lot about the vulgar extravagance of the people who used to live in that town. Wood is a precious enough natural commodity already, but when you think of the tiny amount of wood that is in the stalk of an apple, and imagine how many of those you would need to create a piece of Apple Wood furniture, you have to be ashamed to be human.

Little wonder then, that we all go around dressed in the skins of other animals, in a feeble attempt to disguise the fact that we are members of a race that has been famous since the beginning of time for commiting sins involving apples. And bananas of courses, but there’s no mention of that in the bible, is there? Of course not – the Creationists and religious zealots don’t want us to know that we used to have a lot of bananas, as that would prove that we evolved from apes.