Circa 2005. Apparently from one of my “edgy” phases.

I’ve recently come to realise that the cheapest option is not always the best. I learned this when I bought an inflatable deathbed, which I used during my recent illness. The rusty nails that were in my throat at the time apparently punctured the airbed, and as a result I am still alive. I blame shoddy workmanship. Nails should not go rusty in your throat, if your throat is dry.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I’ll leave out the bit that introduces all of the characters and paints a picture of their surroundings. Then I’ll send it to an editor and have them shorten it further. If that doesn’t work, I’ll break it into two parts, like Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill”.

I must say I enjoyed that film immensely. Mainly because there was plenty of yellow in it. I like yellow. Yellow summons up images of suns and flowers and dairy by-products and all sorts of wonderful things, but apart from that, the very word itself contains a wonderful contrast.

The two words “yell” and “low”, which of course are complete opposites. You cannot yell and be “low” at the same time, unless of course “low” refers to your physical location rather than the pitch of your voice.

For example, you could be yelling at the bottom of a canyon. Even then, though, you would have to be sure that the bottom of the canyon is below sea level. Otherwise you’re not low. And how on earth are you going to be able to measure your position relative to sea level, when something that you yelled three minutes ago is still echoing off the canyon walls and distracting you?

Canyons of course themselves contain a similar contradiction.

You clearly cannot be “cany” and “on” at the same time. If you do, you’ll do yourself an injury, end up attempting to sue me for some vague thing that your dodgy lawyer comes up with, and get laughed out of court. And it serves you right. If you want a quick buck, you should get yourself a more legitimate source, like a pyramid scheme or something.

There are still countless pyramids in Egypt waiting for a sponsor, and instead of supporting them with a clever and intricate system of chain e-mails, you are wasting your time trying to pursue a canyon-related writ that stands no chance of success.

You fucking idiot.

Besides, the only thing of any value that has ever happened in a canyon has involved the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, both of whom are fictional characters and therefore of no meaning in our real world. And even if they were not fictional, they would still be two-dimensional, so they could hide from you instantly just by standing at a 180 degree angle from you, rendering them invisible.

Not that an added dimension would be likely to make these creations any more credible. The only way of adding a dimension to a cartoon character is to turn it into a puppet, and then we’re talking about some guy’s hand up your ass. The only person who could put his hand up your ass with any credibility was the late Jim Henson. And he’s dead. Although I’m sure his son could re-animate him with the help of a few strings and a suitable stuffing.

Personally I think Christopher Reeve said it best, when he said “The Muppets were cool. I watch Pigs in Space and I think, some day that will be me. As soon as I recover from this damn horse-riding injury. I’m going to make another Superman movie too, you know. Just give me another few months and I’ll untangle all these nerve-endings with my Swiss army knife. Did you know I was in the Swiss army? Neither did I, but I must have been, because I seem to have one of their knives.

I wonder did I suffer some memory loss too? I asked the doctor but I can’t recall what he told me. Anyway, another few months and I’ll be right as rain.”

Circa 2006

Here in Europe the oversupply of turnips, after twenty years of agricultural incentives offered by the European Union for growing them, has reached epic proportions.

It is not literally a mountain of course. That would be impractical, as the temperature at the summit would be far lower than is feasable for the storage of such produce. Besides, the streams created by rainfall would destroy much of the food, particularly if there are otters.

The excess turnips are in fact kept in huge holes in the ground at strategically selected locations in The Netherlands, a country renowned for it’s unrelenting hostility to mountains of all kinds, and therefore a nation of experts on concealed underground storage.

The Dutch have a wonderful obsession with keeping things flat. They of course invented many of the low-roofed, aerodynamically shaped sports cars which we see in our shopping centre car parks today. Car parks which themselves were completely level until a few years ago, when lack of space finally compelled them to reluctantly allow the building of multi storey car parks.

Even these are placed under the ground if at all possible, and ceiling height is kept to a minimum, as is floor height.

Here in Ireland it’s a whole different story.

Not only is Dublin now flagged by an eponymous mountain range to the west, the city itself is being populated with vast eight and nine story skyscrapers, much to the chagrin of environmentalists who know that such monstrosities only serve to force clouds higher into the sky, right into the flightpath of the average jumbo jet, thereby increasing the likelihood that such aircraft will have to waste extra precious fuel in revving up their vast engines and forcing their way through a domineering Cirrocumulus.

I’ve always wondered why the air industry doesn’t take a leaf out of the Navy’s book, and rather than wasting money on huge airports, instead land on flying aircraft carriers. Passengers could then be shuttled to the ground in helicopters, in much the same way that they are often bussed from the plane to the terminal at traditional airports.

Another obvious alternative is underground travel.

Britain and France have made a brave attempt at it by drilling a railway tunnel under the sea to connect their countries. But due to the curvature of the earth, a horizontal tunnel can only go a few hundred miles straight before it comes out again.

What we need are tunnels that go straight down, or decline at steep angles, until they come out at some other part of the world. We could then travel by an extremely efficient cable car which would simply fall to it’s destination, then fall back again.

Why DaVinci didn’t think of this when he was doodling plans for a flying machine, I have no idea. Perhaps it’s because he worked with paintbrushes and not apples, and therefore did not have many incidences of anything falling on his head during his work, thus inspiring him to consider the possibilities of harnessing gravity.

We really do need more gravity in this world. People are too damn giddy and obsessed with enjoying themselves. A little levitas is sadly lacking, and as far as I’m concerned it all started with bungee jumping.

The organisers of this so-called sport have managed to use clever marketing and branding to con the participants into thinking that they are “jumping”, thereby instilling them with the mistaken belief that they are contributing to the amount of kinetic energy in the atmosphere in an environmentally friendly hobby.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

A bungee “jump” is ninety nine percent “fall”, two percent “jump”, one percent “getting rescued”.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If they try, put at least one finger in each of your ears and, if necessary, pretend that you’ve got a learning disability. Taking care of course not to do it in a way that portrays a stereotypical image of those who are genuinely afflicted with such a condition.

Anyway, let’s finish off with a poem, shall we.

A cat or a puppy – oh what a choice
One brings you walkies, the other kills mice
If only the breeders could open their eyes
And come up with some sort of a compromise

More fine poetry here

Neal’s Belch no. 182 for 15th Dec 2004

The Greek god Alpha Medes said it best, when he said “Cast not a thought for the wretched in June, for they will be dead in February”. The Greek calendar of course runs backwards, so February is later in the year than June.

Unless of course he was talking about February of the following year. But had he meant that, I think he would have made it clear. Greek gods aren’t stupid, you know. Except of course the Greek god of Stupidity. But that sort of goes with the territory.

Anyway, my favorite month of the year has always, always been March. For one thing, I love the military air suggested by the month’s title, and the fleeting reference to the novel “Alice in Wonderland”. But apart from that, I just find that March rolls along nice and steadily, and before you know it it’s April, which happens to be the month I like best.

Come to think of it, May isn’t too bad either, if you can get around the fact that it’s named after a fly.

Not that I have anything against flies. Not in their plural form, anyway. It’s just that I object strongly to the singular, “fly”. I find it so obnoxious for anything to have the letter y in it. There are plenty of common letters in the alphabet, which can be combined in hundreds of thousands of combinations. So there is no reason for any of us to resort to using the last few letters. Especially not Y or Z. Let’s not lower ourselves to the vulgar standards of those who suffer, through their own poor dietary habits, from verbal diahorrea.

Even worse are those who suffer from the more practical forms of this disorder. Countless millions have been wasted; poured into holes in the ground because certain co-coordinators at NASA with more influence than sense, have decided to go the “scenic route” to mars, instead of traveling in a straight line and just veering slightly to the left if an asteroid gets in the way.

Personally, I think Adam West, start of the original Batman television series, said it best when he said “Ask not how the void can be increased to make time greater, ask how the existing time can be more richly employed”. Admittedly he was speaking in the context of a symposium of TV scheduling managers, almost all of whom found his statement ridiculous, but you see my point, don’t you?

When I was a child, the highlight of the television week was The Muppet Show, and it lasted approximately eighteen minutes per episode, not counting advertisements. Yet it took almost half an hour to watch the show, despite the rewind and pause buttons not having been invented for television yet. This has baffled scientists for many years, and the eminent astrologist Professor Stephen Hawkins has predicted that it will continue to do so for a few more years, unless Libra makes good use of a rising Pisces moon in the south next week.

Which, knowing Libra, he probably won’t.

Circa 2005

I must say that, having been to see the new movie “Walk the Line”, based on the biography of Johnny Cash, a long-held bitterness about the world’s attitude to white vests has been reawakened in me. For those who don’t know, this all started a number of years ago when I spent a Summer working as a sock model for an underwear manufacturer here on the east coast of Ireland.

You are probably not aware that there are two completely different ways of making string vests. The traditional method, of course, involves simply knitting the vest from a long roll of white string. This was perfectly adequate for many centuries, when the only cats were tigers and lions who lived far away in the jungle, and were of no particular threat to the average male whose string vest had a loose thread. When wild cats wanted some string to play with, then just had to go find themselves a sheep.

Then of course, somebody invented the domestic cat. And everything unravelled. So the clothes designers came up with a new idea. Most modern string vests are made by punching a series of holes in a plain white t-shirt, until it becomes effectively a string vest, with the advantage of not being made from a ball of string. Now, these vests bear absolutely no relation to the awful string vests of the early twentieth century, yet apparently it is “uncool” to be seen wearing one.

However, if the aforementioned movie is to be believed, Johnny Cash’s career was going reasonably well until he ditched his cool white vests and started to dress entirely in black. A feeble attempt, of course, to turn himself into an artificial black cat, thereby attracting good luck. However, Mr. Cash apparently misunderstood the concept of “crossing your path”. Rather than traversing the carriageway directly from one side to the other, as any competent black cat will do, Cash decided to stop halfway across, then, in a pathetic attempt to outdo his feline heroes, he “Walked the Line”.

The result of course was Cash’s infamous arrest for jaywalking, followed by a spell in prison. And rightly so. But the point is, Johnny Cash has recently attracted a new generation of young fans, despite having been seen blatantly wearing a white vest on at least two occasions, as depicted in this authorised biographical movie. Not only that, there have been several films over the years in which vest wearers have been depicted as tremendously cool and macho – Martin Sheen in “Wall Street”, for example, and that guy in “Rambo”.

And Bruce Willis in pretty much everything, except of course “The Sixth Sense”, in which he played a **** ***. (I’ve deleted a couple of words here in case you haven’t seen the film yet). Those guys don’t wear vests because if they did, you would be able to see their decomposing arms, and that would distract you from what they are saying. There’s nothing more irritating than having someone stare at your decomposing elbows, when you’re trying to gaze into their eyes and tell them how much they love you.

Actually, now that you mention it, maybe that’s why my fiancée Joanne won’t let me wear vests. It must have been when I tripped over that puppy last month. It did hurt at the time, but I’m not a cry baby so I didn’t check myself into a mortuary or anything.

Anyway the point is, I’ve never managed to get the hang of these damn subtle differences between the real world and the word of make-believe. I mean, last night I dreamed that I was eating a cat. Yet, when I woke up, I was ravenously hungry. That’s ridiculous. There must have been at least a half pound of meat on that thing. But of course a dream interpreter will charge you a week’s wages to tell you that the cat whose meat you ate in the dream was made of “black matter”, like the stuff they’ve discovered in black holes in space (see figure 2, above) so it just makes your stomach even less full than it was before you started the dream.

Then you pay another week’s wages to a nutritionist, who’ll tell you cats don’t contain enough vitamin “C”, and you’d better buy a bucket of these orange tablets or you’ll die. Well, I didn’t buy them, and I’m still here. Instead, I fed them to my neighbour’s black cat. My experience with the dream interpreter has led me to believe that a black cat is some sort of creature that’s made from anti-matter. If that’s the case, they probably spend their entire day getting hungrier and hungrier. Poor bastards. So anyway, I ate it.

From circa 2005. Not intended as anything other than piece of nonsense writing.

It feels like several years have passed since the events of September 11th 1999 . And, for me anyway, they have faded into memory and I cannot for the life of me remember how I spent that day.

One thing is for certain. I was several years younger than I am today, and the turn of the millennium was but a pair of cat’s eyes on the horizon of the winter solstice, waiting for it’s arrival to shed disappointingly little light on the eternal questions which we therefore carry with us into the twenty first century.

And now here we are, three fifths of a decade later. Yet can it be called a decade when it splits it’s legs unequally, not only between the nineties and the “noughties”, but between two centuries of different beginnings, and between two milleniumias: one now wholly of the past, the other almost entirely – and in any case sufficiently so for it to be predominately the case and therefore the dominant simply by the application of the principle majority rule which any healthy democracy knows is the fairest possible way, albeit not a perfect one – of the future?

And where are we today? As a child I used to visualise the months of the year as being arranged in a wheel shape, with November at eleven o’clock on a steep incline, and this time of year at the bottom of a friendly downhill slope from Christmas. If I’m right, that means we go back round the same wheel every year, which means that effectively the passage of time can only bring limited advances until we end up back where we are, like a year-long Groundhog Day.

That is why no amount of training for years in space, and engines that last forever, can enable man to reach the furthest planets. It is simply chronologically impossible to get to anywhere that is more than a year away.
That’s why plants flower but once a year, rather than trying what they know is unachievable – flowering continuously through consecutive calendrical cycles. It’s why animals go into hibernation to make sure they are not active continuously for more than a year at a time.
For if nature allowed us to continue something through two years in a row, she knows we would recognise it second time round, and know that she was cheating and re-using the same year all the time.

It’s why the world can only grow big enough to spin once on it’s axis in any year. And thank god for that. Our lives are busy enough rushing around from place to place. The last thing we need is to live on a planet that spins, say, twice as fast as it currently does. No doubt some pharmaceutical manufacturer would come up with a cure for dizziness, and through lack of competition keep the price high until it’s patent runs out after seventy years (thirty-five new years).

Clearly the less adventurous among us would have to move to one of the polar extremes, which rotate less quickly. And what with the melting of the ice caps, we would experience an extreme shortage of ice and have to drink hot beverages all the time. The resultant extra heat would cause untold acceleration in global warming, and we’d be pretty much bandjaxed.
Don’t say you weren’t warned. Or at least, if you must lie, try not to lie to yourself. It’s one thing deceiving others – it’s quite another to try to con yourself. That’s just a recipe for disaster. Just yesterday I tried to trick myself out of five euro which I wanted for sweets. Next thing I knew, I’d inexplicably lost five euro of my own money. I have no idea where.

Published as Neal’s Belch or Neal’s Issues circa 2005. Although I see I took the liberty of updating my age for a mid 2000s IYH Blog rehash. I won’t be doing that again.

You may be aware that recently I suffered an injury to my right forefinger, causing a bruise which has taken this past ten days to heal. I’m pleased to say that I am now on the mend, but my scrape with the wall did cause me to contemplate my mortality, or lack thereof. I have been alive now for almost thirty-six years, and therefore assume that I am immortal. However, it may be that my hand and legs are not. And apparently some people who lose limbs choose to hold a burial service for their lost body part. This of course is not to be confused with the phenomenon of dogs who try to bury a bone in the back garden, but instead end up burying one of their own lower legs.

Anyway, I’ve decided that if it ever turns out that I am not technically “immortal”, and I do die, I will get around this by holding a burial service for my body, as if it is simply a missing limb. I will then ignore the fact that I am dead, and carry on as normal, hoping nobody notices. If necessary, I will declare my departure in my tax returns. I am, after all, a law-abiding citizen, and will not under any circumstances seek to undermine the authority of the government in matters of the re-allocation of incomes towards state spending.

My only worry is that my body will decide that I am dead, and hold a burial service for me at the same time that I am holding a burial service for it. I suppose at least we could save money by having a double plot, and be buried side by side, but who then would carry on the important task of being Neal?

Perhaps Justin, my middle name, could take over. I’ve always thought he was a nice chap, and it really is time that he got some of the limelight. Incidentally, since when has lime been capable of emitting light? That’s the most stupid phrase I’ve ever heard, yet I continue to use it. I’m like a sheep that blindly follows the herd as they are rounded up and pushed through the gate by the three-legged dog that for some reason is carrying a bone and, rather appropriately, looking sheepish.

That reminds me. There are not enough webcomics about sheep in this world. Perhaps if I get time I will create Matchstick Sheep, but let’s assume for a moment that I don’t. What is going to become of our children, who are being raised on a diet of Battle of the Planets and Huckleberry Hound? Where are our city kids going to learn the ways of the farm? There are far too many children in my locality who go through school without learning how to milk a cow. What on earth are they going to do in the event of a dairy workers’ strike? Does nobody think about these things any more?

And while I’m on the subject, why does a pint of low fat milk take up exactly the same amount of space as a pint of regular milk? Surely if there is less fat in it there will be less of it. And why have the bottled water manufacturers so far failed to come up with a “diet” version of their beverage? Those of us who try to diet are constantly being told that we have to cut out fat and unhealthy stuff from our lives, and drink more water, but when we try to do so we are cut down from all directions, like a forest coming under attack from a sword-wielding newspaper proprietor who has run out of paper and needs to get his hands on some quickly.

And that reminds me. If something is fried in fat, and you eat the something but not the fat, isn’t that a fat-free meal? And what happens if you make sausages out of a nice part of the pig, rather than it’s stomach and urinary equipment? Are you still allowed to call them sausages, or would you be in contravention of European Union regulations regarding the naming of food items? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter since you would probably give them a more upmarket name, to avoid selling yourself short. I always try to avoid selling myself short. I’m five feet, ten and a half inches tall, you know, and proud of it. It took a lot of effort to grow this tall, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pretend to be shorter than I am, just for the sake of not looking greedy.

Furthermore, I’m hungry.

bout

Circa 2005

Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every year of every decade of every century of every millennium of every age, can be measured using a wristwatch. 

But why bother?  They’re all pretty much the same length anyway.

When God divided the minutes into sixty seconds, he did one hell of a good job of distributing the lengths equally. That’s one thing you can say about the presiding deity in which much of the world’s population believes. He sure as hell gets the small things right.

You take flies for example. One less leg than they have, and they wouldn’t be able to stand up straight. Apparently he modelled them on Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous design for a helicopter.

Good for God. He clearly has plenty of drive and ambition.

Personally though, I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “Expect not to reap what you sow, for arrogant is he (or she) who dares to expect the planned outcome, and saintly is he who acknowledges with humility and honesty that he will make a complete cat’s breakfast of it.”

Failure is a wonderful thing.

There is nothing I like better, for example, than to see a parachutist fail to land on a passing cirrocumulus cloud before it bursts open and soaks him, causing him to reach for his spare parachute to use as a makeshift anorak. This really is marvellous entertainment, and I am surprised, if not a little outraged, that it has not been made into some sort of situation comedy by the BBC. (At time of writing Irish television does not make successful or watrchable sit-coms)

I’ve always been surprised at how little we make use of clouds. Nowadays the weather can be controlled for short distances, and surely it is not beyond the reach of the experts to manufacture a cloud that is strong and thick enough to hold a plane as it refuels mid-air, thereby reducing traffic congestion at airports.

Scientists are pretty useless when it comes to finding practical uses to which to put their genius. They’re all obsessed with studying tiny organisms who we’ll never meet in our day to day lives, and sending puppies to the moon to check the best-before date of the cheese.

It seem to me that young people are turning away from science and looking towards something else, and as we drift further into the first century of this, the third millennium, (unless of course there were more millennia before those and we just hadn’t developed the intelligence to count them yet – which seems unlikely) it would appear that our young people have adopted a new kind of faith which, happily, is now guiding them towards a more fulfilled and complete existence on this Earth.

The Nike “swoosh”, that wonderfully positive tick sign is now emblazoned on the outer garments of the top ten per cent of our young people whom the company endorses.

Those lucky enough to qualify for this awards scheme get to bear the symbol proudly on their anorak, leg-trouser or even running shoe, thereby indicating to the world that they are legitimate members of our community, and not to be messed with under any circumstances up to and including nuclear holocaust, the death of a pope (as proved recently) and the cancellation of Music Television’s “Pimp my Ride”.

This website’s proprietor alas, is not one of the chosen, and goes about dressed in drab chinos and polo shirts, head hung in shame as he parades his pathetic self down the high street of his town. One of course lives in hope of some day getting to hold against the skin the textilic trophy of recognition, as produced by some equally blessed eight year old at some elite and hidden factory in Thailand or some such place: a sweat shop paralleled only by that of Willy Wonka himself.

Not to be pedantic, but perhaps the whole debate about low cost outsourcing would be a little less confusing if the premises involved were not called “sweat shops”. Surely the stores in which these items of confectionery are sold, are the ones who should use that title. The place of manufacture should obviously be labelled “sweat factory”.

It is this abuse of the English language that is making the world a worse place to live. My mother’s home town has recently been populated with a selection of sponsored street furniture, all of which bears the company name “Street Bench’s Ltd.” or some such thing. This flagrant misplacing of a possessive apostrophe is nothing short of pure evil, and this website will stop at nothing to wipe it out. Just yesterday myself and Joanne sat on one of these seats while waiting for a bus and now, just twenty four hours later, we are suffering from tiredness, a common cold or possibly leperacy. Not being a medical expert myself, I do not feel qualified to make a specific diagnosis.

Nor should you.

This sort of thing must be left to the professionals who have devoted so many years of their lives to attending lectures with heavy hangovers and writing letters to the newspapers about the preponderment of robins spiting out their worms halfway through their meals due to the deterioration in taste of the current harvest of crawling insects.

Personally, I don’t worry about that sort of thing too much. As far as I’m concerned, once half the worm gets half eaten, there’s one less worm in the world to bother me.

And christ do they bother me.

Those bastards are just like miniature snakes, except of course that they have lower standards of hygiene and instead of slipping their skin every now and then, they are happy to go about baked in mud.

Not that there’s anything wrong with mud, you understand. I myself am perfectly happy to walk in mud whenever the mood takes me. But I’m designed for that. I have legs and feet and shoes, unlike the humble worm who just slides about naked in it and gets it all over him or her self.

Perhaps mud is the Nike “swoosh” of the worm world, where young worms feel the need to cover themselves in the latest batch of fashionable sewage in order to fit in with their cohorts. In fact, I seem to remember that there was a band called “Mud” in the nineteen seventies, who were very popular with the young people. I assume that is where it all derived from.

But then I also assume that moon is made of cheese. Having never travelled to the lunar satellite, I must base my understanding of it’s makeup on all that I have read about it. A couple of pages in an encyclopaedia about the moon landing, and several dozen nursery rhymes. Like this one for example –

Half past noon
Let’s go to the moon
And visit the pink baboon

He’ll welcome us soon
And lend us a spoon
And we’ll sample the cheddar moon

We’ll try out the cheddar
And it will taste bedder
Than anything we’ve ever seen

So we’ll gobble it all
And after we’ll fall
In love with the cheese on the moon

And if we’ve got room
After eating the moon
The baboon will make us some tea

He’ll be all smiles
Visible for miles
Then he’ll eat us

– That sort of thing. Anyway, where was I?

More fine poetry here

First published as a MatchstickCats.com Editorial, circa 2005. A glorious era when this site had several regular columnists whose spelling I was very good at correcting, so I gave myself a promotion.

It’s always been a good idea to live by a motto, and what better phrase to live by but “Quid illyas manholia actuality”, which of course means “An electric eel can easily be adapted for foreign travel with the help of a lightweight converter plug”. But of course, life is never as simple as that, is it? For a start, you cannot put electric sea creatures into water. You’ll get electrocuted, and at best cause the warranty to become void.

There was a time, back in the early nineteen eighties, when the only thing we had to worry about was finding some way to harvest the sweat water running off our backs, so that we wouldn’t be accused of wastage when it flowed onto the ground while we were working. In the end, somebody developed drainpipe trousers, and that was another of life’s problems over with, done and dusted, all sorted out by technology.

On the other hand, nobody has as yet managed to find a cure for the summertime blues, over thirty years after the sadly deceased Eddie Cochrane brought the issue to the attention of the record buying public. Perhaps he should have chosen his audience more wisely. Scientists and inventors rarely have time to listen to pop music, with the obvious exception of Trevor Bailiff, inventor of the clockwork radio. I believe at the moment he’s busy working on a clock that’s powered by radio waves.

This is very worrying. We have had enough problems recently with sea waves that tragically ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The last thing we need is this asshole harvesting audio waves and making them bigger.

We here at MatchstickCats.com urge you to boycott the radio wave powered clock, the minute it comes out.

Remember the solar eclipse of the nineteen eighties? When the whole moon was blocked by the sun for ten minutes? Mercifully the moon managed to move out of it’s shadow, but next time we might not be so lucky. It is obviously no coincidence that this happened just as solar powered calculators were becoming fashionable. Let’s put a stop to this crap right now, before it gets out of hand.