Category: Writings

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.

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?