Category: Writings

Neal’s Belch no. 195 for 12th Mar, 2005

I’ve always held a strong objection to the amount of wastage involved in the spelling of the word “queue” That said, it is, I must admit, rather attractive when seen in it’s written form, and I have spent many a rainy day writing it down for future generations to enjoy millennia from now, long after those of us who are intelligent enough to recognise it’s subtle beauties, have perished, and the entity that you have come to know as “Neal’s Belch”, is long forgotten.

Another word of which I am undeniably fond is paraquat.

I am unsure as to it’s meaning but I am led to understand that it’s use is of a horticultural nature. This is unfortunate, since horticultural is an ugly and unpleasant word. Ironically, it also reminds me of pigs, which are non-horticultural. Not that I have anything against pigs, you understand.

It’s just that they are disgusting, vile creatures who bathe in their own vomit and kill small children. Where I come from, that sort of thing is frowned upon. Nevertheless, I am prepared to tolerate the presence of pigs within our society, provided that they are pigs in the privacy of their own homes and don’t harm anyone else with their foul and unnatural deviation from the norm. For example, they must ensure that their use of towels in public lavatories does not result in a risk to public health.

I’ve always had a greater than average amount of trouble with drying my hands in public lavatories. Perhaps it is something to do with my waste obsession. I never like to hit the button on the hand dryer a second time if I’m not completely dry yet, as I end up using only half of the second cycle, then walking away, leaving at least three cubic milicentres of hot hair air to blow into the Ethernet, never to be used by anyone except perhaps a passing firefly who needs a top-up.

I have the same problem with towels.

I’m only going to use about two feet of the cloth, and leave the rest of the roll (around fifty feet) untouched, so there seems little point in causing a whole role to be sent to the laundry just so that I can selfishly dry my hands and go away looking all content, like a cheese obsessive who’s just won a trip to the moon and who is under the misapprehension that it is made of cheese, and is also under the mistaken belief than he can eat the ground beneath his feet, under zero gravity, zero atmosphere conditions, without any serious consequences for his safety and well being.

That said, I’ve always wanted to live in zero gravity conditions. What with ground rents being so high here in Ireland , and the sheer amount of empty space that seems to be available above us, it makes sense from a purely logical point of view.

Also it looked cool in that dream I had last night. Which reminds me, I wrote a poem. Some time ago. I can’t remember what it was about or anything but it was an enriching experience and I would highly recommend it to those of you who are as talented as me. Those of you who are not, should consider a career in carpentry.

With a bit of luck and God on your side, you’ll turn out to be the second coming of Christ, which hopefully is not quite as vulgar as the phrase appears to suggest. Of course, there was no censorship in the days when the Bible was written, so you could get away with that sort of stuff, so long as you wrote it carefully and neatly on expensive parchment in fancy writing, such as Times Roman Numeral. After all, appearance is everything when most of the world have not yet learned to read.

Personally, although I consider myself a practicing Christian, I have never been a great believer in the whole Christ / going to church / believing in god / loving thy neighbour / being good / not killing people / trying to leave this world a better place than it was when you came into it, thing.

It just all seems a little far fetched for me, and I find that the only things I need to live my life are Santa Claus and the Internet, that wonderful technology which for the last seventeen months has allowed me to bring my thoughts to, at it’s peak, an audience of five people per week.

Internet, of course, is short for International Network, a phrase meaning an interconnected system of nets which can catch radio waves and convert them into web pages, just like this one, visible to the naked eye, if not those which are partially dressed. I still remember with fondness my first night at Web Design class, where I was introduced to the wonders of HTML coding and how to deal with stalkers who would stop at nothing to get into your computer and draw a silly moustache on your photo on the Writers’ page. Thankfully, none of this happened to me, and besides I’ve seen several episodes of Matlock, and therefore have an intimate knowledge of the legal framework involved.

Anyway, two cats walk into a bar.

One of the cats is Jewish, but to avoid stereotyping he portrays an atheist cat. The other (female) cat is Woody Allen in drag, and not two minutes into the scene he realises that it is extremely difficult to balance one’s glasses on a cat’s nose. He fears that he will look like one of those scary middle aged men who always come into your workplace as customers, with their glasses slid right down to the bottom of their noses, so that they can peer at you over the frames in an intimidating authoritative fashion.

So he decides to hand the role over to Leonardo DeCaprio. This despite his being thirty years younger than the cat who he is supposed to play.

In the midst of all of this hullabaloo, it never occurs to anyone to point out that the other cat is a Siamese, and could play both characters if anyone thought to ask one or both of his heads.

And therein, as always, lies a lesson.

Anyway, another two cats walk into another bar. Why the hell not. One of the cats is actually a pig dressed as a cat, and the other is a cat dressed as a pig dressed as a cat. This leads to terrible confusion for the bartender, who is prejudiced against pigs. In the ends, both cats are asked to remove their clothing. They both do so, for the hell of it, and the first cat’s true identity as a pig is revealed.

However the second cat, who you’ll remember is a cat dressed as a pig dressed as a cat, just removes his outer cat disguise, revealing his fake pig identity.

of the cats get removed from the bar, and the police are called. Just as they arrive, the second cats shouts “Who the hell called the pigs?”, and it becomes obvious that he is really a cat dressed as a pig (and previously a cat dressed as a pig dressed as a cat). Luckily, the cops turn out to be cats dresses up as policemen / pigs, and they all have a good laugh about it in the end, with the exception of the bartender who is prosecuted under section seven, subsection two of the Discrimination Act,1955.

And quite rightly too. There’s far too much of that sort of thing going on, if you ask me.

Archival Note: This was the final Neal’s Belch. Shortly after a completely different and unrelated series began, called Neal’s Issues, as well as another callecd MatchstickCats.com Editorials.

Circa 2005

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “Quad arisces domitorium”, which of course means “Ask not what your hamster ca –

– No I haven’t. That’s ridiculous. I can’t do this anymore.

This constant stream of lies, for no other reason than to fill a screen with nonsensical ramblings about cats and turnips and other such entities which deserve to be treated much more seriously than this.

For the past twenty months I have abused you, dear reader, by fobbing you off with absolute carp. And as a result you are left to pick up the pieces and go about your daily life armed with false information and made-up anecdotes that not only waste your time, they may even lead you into danger. I am truly sorry.

Let me try to make some small gesture towards rectifying the situation by telling you something, for a change, that is true and that will help you, rather than hinder you, in your attempt to get through your miserable existence.

Where I work, in a large office building in the centre of Dublin city, Ireland, there is a window behind me which faces onto the back of a well known, upmarket hotel.

And the hotel is undergoing major renovations that are expected to last a year or two, hence being closed for business at the moment. As a result tourists, unable to find any suitably high standard accommodation nearby, have taken to sleeping in the little alcoves that frame our office’s windows, all of which by the way are kept clean by the office cat, who licks each pane of glass thoroughly over a continuous two week cy –

– Never mind. Anyway, the building work at the hotel gets pretty noisy, and it’s hard to hear yourself think sometimes. Just yesterday I was thinking about the fact that there are seahorses, sea lions and sea fishes, but no sea cats, and I came up with a brilliant solution but I can’t for the life of me tell you what it is, because just as I was thinking it, my idea was drowned out by another blast of drilling from next door.

Where is this going? You may well ask. Frankly, I make this up as I go along and have no idea. On top of that I’m a little short of ideas at the moment, so don’t be surprised if the rest of this is just filler. Monkey one, monkey two, monkey three, peanut time. Full stop. Dot. Dot. Tod. Todd. That’s how you come up with a boy’s name. Now, for girls, it’s a little different. Trill, tril, lirt, flirt, skirt, brown, Hazel.

As if writer’s block isn’t enough (and frankly it isn’t, if I’m only going to be able to get six words out of discussing it), I also have an obscure Tom Petty song going round in my head, and I’m humming along with it, and that’s not helping my sore ear. Not that I would expect it to.

In case you’re wondering, it’s the one from the Full Moon Fever album that goes “but I’ll probably feel a little bit better when you’re gone”. Have you noticed that the young people nowadays always spell “you’re” as “your”? Me neither. But apparently the part of my brain that types, has.

What else? I’ve been eating a lot of spinach lately, as part of a calorie controlled diet of course, and oddly enough it goes beautifully with that dried pasta that comes in a bag with the sauces already in it. I’m also consuming copious quantities of fruit. So much of it in fact that –

Sorry, had to go out for a minute. Anyway, pasta is of course an anagram of “pasat”, which I believe is a misspelling of a model of car produced by Nissan. Now, oddly enough Nissan used to be called Datsun, and if you re-arrange the letters of the company’s old name, you get “A sun”, but you have a couple of letter left over if you do that. And if there’s one thing the motor industry can’t be doing with, it’s wastage.

That’s why they avoided pursuing “A sun” as a possible fuel source for modern vehicles, steering well away from the idea of solar cars. Thee had realised, using nothing but a clever analysis of the English language, that solar power always leaves waste. After all, do we really want to be here in twenty years time trying to figure out what to do with the copious amounts of unused sunlight that is being dumped at the sides of Oasises in the Sahara Desert, and other such places?

Okay I’m done. Sorry.

From Spring 2005, a “MatchstickCats.com Editorial”

Many years have passed since Ronald Reagan stood on the steps of the library in Dallas, Texas , U.S.A, North America and said “Godammit how the hell could he have done it from that angle?”. And still the mystery of JFK’s death goes ignored and it is assumed by all who get listened to, that whathisname who later got shot did it.

Now, I don’t really care about any of that, but it strikes me that public libraries are far from the wonderful places thaT they could be.

In my youth, a library was a place to which you rode your pedal cycle on a Saturday morning, books strapped carefully to your back carrier, and spent hours and hours joyfully browsing the magical scripts within. Nowadays, they are full of computers and videos and lavatories and smartcards and all sorts of modern and hideous apparatus.

If you tried to shoot somebody from a library nowadays, you would no doubt get caught on web cam by some geek who is busy talking online with a friend at the other side of the world who has the same interests. A love of cheese, perhaps. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m sure President Kennedy might have been with us to this very day, had his alleged assassin been instilled by his parents with a healthy interest in dairy by-products of one kind or another, rather than an uncontrollable tendency to get caught up in alleged conspiracies and / or assassinations and things.

But the point is, it is assumed that something old cannot be made interesting unless it is replaced with something new.

It has never occurred to anyone that instead of replacing the book with something modern and fancy like an electro-book that they put on their i-pod, or whatever the hell they do nowadays, you could instead write a more contemporary book that is relevant to the people who you hope will read it.

“The Cat in the Hat”, for example, should be rewritten in the light of the changes to pet owning fashions that happened after the release of the movie Babe, and should feature a pig in a baseball hat, wearing sports garments and footwear that were made in some far flung hellhole by factory workers who are approximately the same age as the reader.

Or it could at least feature a more modern hat.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, I could open up another window here and look at porn sites for a while, and if someone comes into the room I just flick back to that nerdy site with all the articles, and they’re none the wiser.

And you’d be largely right about that. But the point is, any cat that is presented to our young people as a piece that aspires to become popular culture, must be adapted to the fashions of the time. Otherwise the youth of today will just cower in fear behind their hideous home entertainment apparatus and perspiration-soaked running shoes made, rather ironically if you ask me, in sweat shop factories. Just like the one in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, although that was set in the United States , where it’s called candy instead of sweets for some reason. (2024 note: It was not set in the United States, you idiot)

And there were no cats in either the book or the original film adaptation, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” starring Gene Wilder and that kid who grew up to be, rather ironically I thought given the involvement of teeth-rotting sweets, a dentist. I’m afraid I have not seen the new version, as it has only just been released here, so I cannot vouch for it’s cat contents, or lack thereof. Furthermore, I hear that a newly-found extra chapter of the book has just been published to raise money for charity, and based on my limited information I must assume, until I know better, that there is a fifty: fifty chance of there being a cat in it.

Furthermore, it was with amazement in their eyes that my audience in a local pub a couple of weeks ago heard me reply that I have never seen the movie “Pretty Woman”. I added, although not with any particular relevance to the conversation, that I have also never seen “Bambi”. I will of course keep my eyes peeled in case he turns up though. I’m sure his mom misses him.

From 2005 or thereabouts, probably.

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “Esq quilillias acrobat agraphobius”, which of course means “There isn’t enough room in here to swing a cat, and if there was, I would not do so anyway, as I feel it would compromise my position as chairperson of the National Campaign against Catswinging.

Unless of course the room was in another nation. In which case, let’s party. I’ve got some Rice Krispie buns and a bottle of fizzy orange in the fridge”

And this brings me to my point. The number of chemicals that are put into oranges and other fruit these days to make them fizzy is an absolute disgrace.

For one thing, it is thirteen, which everybody knows is an unlucky number and should never be used under any circumstance. For another, it is not divisible by any other number that I know of, unless you’re prepared to lower yourself to the standards of those who would fractionise. I will assume that you are not. Therefore the number thirteen cannot be manipulated mathematically in any way should the need arrive, and if it does, a new number will have to be purchased at great expense.

But apart from that, all over the world monkeys are becoming seriously ill after eating these so-called fizzy oranges, soft-drink-ready lemons and carbonated bananas. And I for one say that it has to stop. Not least because it doesn’t happen, and the phenomenon is nothing more than a weird thought going round in my head like a moth going around dangerously close toyour open mouth at night.

As it happens, I always keep my bedroom brightly lit at night, to keep the bogeyman out. The bogeyman has very sensitive eyes, and cannot stand bright lights, so as a sign of goodwill I leave a jar of soothing eye cream for him at the exit.

I have never hard of eye-cream, and suspect that there may be no such thing, yet somehow I feel it is perfectly legitimate to make references to it in this piece of online journalism. Perhaps it is because I’m hungry, and would quite like some eye cream at the moment. I’m not sure.

I seem to remember the old silent movies had a lot of custard pies, which, strangely enough, were white not yellow, and people used to throw them at each other and it would land all over their faces, including their eyes. Perhaps this is what I mean by eye cream. I don’t know.

Or perhaps it is a simple and rather stupid misspelling of “I Cream”, a little used abbreviation of ice cream. Or perhaps my inner voice is trying to tell me something: “I scream”. A cry of hidden torment and discontentment.

Whatever the answer, I don’t really care.

Neal’s Belch no. 194 for 6th Mar, 2005

The thing that strikes me most about modern television is it’s tendency to scratch easily if you attempt to clean the screen with an abrasive material.

That said, I’ve always held great admiration for those who work in the broadcast industry, particularly camera operators and the guy who created the muppets. I also like the news and The Fall Guy, although that’s not on anymore. It was axed after the guy who plays the fall guy realised that he was getting paid only ordinary acting rates, despite the fact that he was playing the roll of a stunt man.

Although he performed dangerous feats in almost every episode, the production company argued that because he was only pretending to be a stunt man, he was not entitled to the going rate for stunt performers.

Not to make a big deal of it, but I’ve never understood why he was called the “fall” guy, when his job was, by definition, specifically not to fall. Unless it was something to do with the American word for Autumn, which of course would make a little more sense as the ground is much more slippy and hazardous when it is covered in wet leaves.

Autumn is pretty much prime season for Fall guys. That’s how you differentiate between a stuntman and a ten year old child. Unlike fall guys, ten year old children tend to fall a lot and get scrapes and bruises in the height of Summer, when they are not at school and therefore out and about more. I spent much of the summer of the tenth year of my life getting treated for ninety degree burns and missing limbs.

Of course, we all grow out of that eventually, and grow up to be bank managers and road sweepers and prime ministers and church ministers and schoolteachers and assistant state pathologists and bookbinders and writers and philosophers and television camera operators and vets and veterinary veterans and army vets who look after army dogs and ships’ cats, and army vets who used to be soldiers but are not retired, which can be very confusing, especially if you add to the confusion by mentioning an army veterinary officer who specialises in treating animals who used to be in the army, in other words he is a vet’s vet.

When he retires from that he’ll be a vet vet’s vet, which if you abbreviate it to VVV, looks like one and a half “w”s, unless you have good eyesight or use a clear font, and are therefore able to see that it is in fact three “v”s.

But I digress.

I’ve never been a huge fan of scratching televisions. For one thing, that sort of thing has pretty much been conquered by the domestic cat, and they’ve got the whole market covered. Wherever there is a television screen waiting to be scratched, you can be damn sure there is a cat, or one of their agents, on their way to the scene to see what can be done. This of course leaves us in a monopolistic situation, where one species has virtually one hundred percent of the industry. But what are you going to do?

I’ll tell you what you’re going to do.

You’re going to sit down in front of the television for an hour to watch The Simpsons, but just as you’re getting into it your telephone will ring, and although it’s only a five minute conversation you’ll forget what you were doing before they called, and you’ll go lie on the bed and read a pseudo-intellectual book about the fast food industry or globalisation or some such issue. Then before you know it, it’ll be bedtime. But you won’t go to bed. Instead you’ll stay up late watching some crappy DVD, and you’ll be exhausted in the morning.

The reason for this is that you are an idiot. But you probably disagree, and you are perfectly entitled to, but that doesn’t change anything, other than the length of this paragraph which I am typing as mere filler. One more sentence, and that will be enough.

This leccture first published as part of the Matchstick Cats.com University, circa 2005

Part One

Back in the early days, before the stone age rocks were very rare (or so people thought), and difficult to locate. So obviously they had to be used sparingly. Hence the origins of today’s essay.

Unbeknownst to most of the population at the time, who were not well educated and still trying to figure out what to do with fire now that they had accidentally invented it by punching a firedragon with a petrol soaked boxing glove, stones were actually to be found all over the place. It’s just that they were difficult to recognise. They all looked like those cool desert lizard things that disguise themselves as rocks.

Then one year the harvest wasn’t very good, due to some random weather that was raining down on them all Summer, so people started looking for sources of food. They thought of eating their cows, but they didn’t like the look of them. They looked like they might not be salty enough. Early humans liked salty foods because they made them thirsty enough to drink the rather unpalatable Ostrich Blood Beer, which was their only drink. Water of course was not discovered until two million years later, when Einstein came up with the idea of blending atoms of hydrogen with oxygen to made a refreshing and nourishing drink.

So instead they attempted to cook up a few of the cool lizard things, of which there appeared to be available in abundance. That’s when they discovered that they were all rocks, not lizards. But at least now they had plenty of rocks on which to build a fire. And somebody suggested that they “could use the fire to cook themselves some of those cool liz-

-oh crap.”

So anyway they all died from starvation and the earth was uninhabited for ten billion years, until some of the rocks evolved into lizards and dinosaurs, and things started kicking again.

This time around, the cool lizard things didn’t look like rocks. But that didn’t really matter because the new generation of humans were intelligent enough to be able to distinguish them from rocks anyway. They mostly avoided the lizard things, possibly because of some sort of sub conscious ancestral memory that they inherited through the cosmos or whatever.

But what they were interested in, was birds. The new generation of humans adored chicken sandwiches, and couldn’t get enough of them. And although they knew that rocks were plentiful, they still had this subconscious thing of not wanting to waste anything. So they tried, where possible, to kill two chickens with one stone. It was known as “re-strangling”, and it has become the basis on which all ecologically friendly practices in the world today are based.

Next time, I’ll tell you exactly how to go about killing two birds with one stone. Or I might just forget all about it and do something about cats.

Part Two

Last time, I told you all about the history of birds and stones and things. Now that you’ve got the background, it’s time to put what you’ve learned into practice.

Firstly, you have to find two suitable birds. Do not, under any circumstances, choose twins. You will become very confused and you won’t be able to tell whether you’ve killed one bird or two, particularly if there’s a mirror nearby. If you have no choice in the matter, at least make sure that one of them is wearing a hat. And make damn certain that you sew the hat to the bird’s feathers. Otherwise they’ll start pissing about and swopping hats and things, and you’ll have no idea which bird is which.

Now, let’s talk about ammo. I myself prefer to practice on clay pigeons first, but if these are not available in your area it’s fine to use papier mache ones. Just make sure that if you are making the papier mache yourself, you use only respectable newspapapers, not one of those dodgy English tabloids that are full of stories about President Clinton’s dog.

But besides that, you don’t want to become distracted by these titillating stories and end up accidentally shooting your cat instead. I’m not suggesting for one moment that you would sink so low as to read a tabloid newspaper, but the people who write this stuff are experts at catching your attention, and there’s every possibility that you might become victim to their overwhelming tactics.

Anyway, you’ve got your clay pigeon shooting equipment, and you’ve had some practice so now it’s time to kill two birds with one stone. And I’ve just realised that we’re meant to be using a stone here, not a gun. So the last two paragraphs were a waste of my valuable time.

Oh well, no point crying over spilt milk. I’ve never understood why anyone would become upset over a quantity of lost dairy product. It’s just milk. Now, if it was spilt liquid gold, that would be a bummer. But let’s get things into proportion here. You can get more milk. Just make sure you keep the cow friendly and co-operative by not accidentally killing him or her with the stone.

So anyway, you’ve got your two birds and you’ve got your stone and now you’re ready to kill the two poor innocent little creatures with the stone. You cold hearted vicious bamtard. What the hell are you doing? I’m having no part in this evil act. Go away.

From Feb 2nd 2005, a MatchstickCats.com Editoral

It was the great Dr. Suess who said, in an entirely unrelated context, “I will not eat lean legs of lamb”. And I think this is a perfectly reasonable statement. After all, a limb of meat that is not sufficiently covered in fat, is about as much use as a cigarette lighter on the sun on a particularly hot day.

Nevertheless, sheep’s legs should not go to waste. They are perfectly good for keeping the animal up off the ground and out of the filthy mud during it’s short life, and after than they can be used as some sort of garage door bolt, I’m sure. There really is far too much wastage in the food industry. Yesterday I was standing outside of a local restaurant when I saw a young cocker spaniel running around on the pavement, obviously having just escaped from the kitchens. Nobody was making any attempt to recapture it, and for all I know it could be living out it’s life as a stray, right now as we speak.

Pigs, on the other hand, don’t waste a thing. Other animals really have a lot to learn from what pigs have done in terms of marketing every last remaining bit of themselves as “sausage”. When have you ever seen a chicken sausage, or a horse sausage? Exacty. Only when there’s some poor bamtard of a creature who’s come down with mad cow disease or leperacy or something, and has to be put down.

Personally, I think sheep number thirty nine on one of my my uncles’ farms said it best, when he said “I’ve got two bloody fine pairs of legs. It’s just that I don’t know which two go together. I mean, does front left form part of a pair with front right, or is it that the two lefts go together as do the two rights, or does it work on a diagonally opposite basis? It’s so complicated being a sheep you know.”

Sadly, number thirty nine is one of only two remaining philosophising sheep in Ireland. The rest have de-evolved into non talking, non thinking animals, who spend much of their time grazing on grass which they have crapped on not three hours prior.

Let’s not let that happen to us humans.

Neal’s Belch no. 195 for 2nd Feb, 2005

The world of botany has always held a fascination for me, particularly since I discovered that the humble bumblebee spends practically all of it’s life performing sexual acts on flowers.

Up until recently I had been under the mistaken impression that bees mated with birds to produce human children. Obviously the gaping hole in the logic had escaped my notice, and it had not occurred to me that if insects, and creatures of the air, are busy making offspring for us, there is nobody around to produce the young of their own species.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps chocolate insects and Easter Eggs and the like are created as some sort of external womb for their young. But that would be silly. The answer to everything is always closer to home, and Easter Eggs are invariably made in Switzerland , during the two extra months of the year which they have to spare, thanks to excellent Swiss’ time-keeping devices which ensure everything is done ahead of schedule.

I’ve always been a great believer in doing things ahead of schedule.

This morning I got up at seven o’clock , despite not needing to rise until ten past. I have pocketed the extra ten minutes and intend to put it towards a new entertainment centre for my four cats. One of them has expressed an interest in listening to Schubert’s “The Trout” twice a day as an alternative to eating fish, as the vet has made it clear in no uncertain terms that he needs to eat less fish.

Fortunately cats are able to derive nutrition from thoughts alone, which create suitably flavoured salivative juices in their mouths and make them feel like they’ve had a square meal. I myself always make sure to have a square meal at lease four times a week. Obviously it has to be four times and no other number.

Otherwise it’s not square. It’s more likely to be pentagonal or octagonal in a leap year; assuming you do it in the week of the 29th of February, which has eight days.

I’ve always refused to be bullied into having an extra day in February every four years. Instead, I take an extra day at the beginning of March, and allow myself to be out of sync with the rest of the sheep until April arrives. The minute April arrives, of course, she grabs my calendar and immediately crosses out the adjustments I have made to each day in March, hence putting it back to normal.

She bleats her head off while doing it, but I’ve trained myself not to listen, and instead hum Bohemian Rhapsody at a moderate level while discretely halfcovering my ears with my hands.

April really is a conformist asshole, but she sure does make good cheese, so I buy some off her every Thursday but I promise to pay her on one of “my” Thursdays, which of course are Wednesdays in March, so I say I’ve already paid. Effectively I get free cheese for the month of March in return for letting her re-normalise my calendar.

I refuse to be subservient of those who choose to interfere with the laws of space-time, and redistribute the four supposedly un-needed quarter days of each year into one day in every four.

Being a puppet of these people is not cool. I think Kermit the Frog explaine this best, when he said, “Hey, are we on yet? This fucking thing is really scraping against the back of my hand today. I think one of the eyes may be loose or something. By the way don’t touch the Miss Piggy puppet today. It may need to be dry-cleaned. Sorry about that, but it’s what happens if whatshisface flutters the eyelids like that. Christ I’m lonely”