Category: Writings

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”

Neal’s Belch no.193 from 2005

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “Quad Eriles Dectaforum”, which of course means “Que Cera Cera”, which translates as “When shit hits the fan, it’s always a good idea to attempt to switch off the electricity at the mains, using nothing but the power of your mind.

However, it is an even better idea to just hit the “off” switch with your finger”. I think Roger Moore said it best, when he said “A pound of sausages and a bottle of low fat milk please. Lovely weather isn’t it? Yeah they’re all back at school. Poor bastards. Never mind, they’ll have a week off at Halloween”.

That said, I’ve always thought that there is no harm in trying to live outside of the ordinary. Where would we be had some adventurous person not ventured to rub two sticks together to see if they would make a good musical instrument. Immediately of course the sticks started to burn, and fire was discovered.

Sadly the cavemen who first discovered it decided it didn’t have a high enough pitch. In fact the fire was so quiet that he couldn’t hear it at all. He just made up the thing about pitch, to make it sound like he knew what he was talking about.

Where would we be, for that matter, had Jesus not stuck with his chosen career of carpentry? There would be no sightings of his mother’s face in blocks of wood and polished floors, and our spiritual life would be the less for it. Jesus, quoted in his biography said that he did things “the Elvis way”. He loved his mommy, and at the age of seventeen he made his first record for her as a birthday present. Sadly gramophones had not been invented yet and Mary mistook the gift for a flat circular fish plate.

The next two months of Jesus’ life were a misery. Every five minutes he was being asked to “magic up” a few more loaves and fishes, so that his mom and her husband Joseph could show off their strange new plateware.

I’ve never been a big fan of fish. The problem is it looks, smells and tastes too much like fish. If that could be changed somehow, I’m sure that I would love it.

I also find it strange that cats like fish. What on earth do they say to their cousins, the catfish, when they see them eating creatures of the sea? Maybe they just don’t talk to their non oxygen-breathing relatives, or perhaps catfish are not considered to be “cats”, because of some sort of snobbish or arbitrary decision make by whoever is responsible for naming things.

While I’m on the subject, why do so many Americans insist on naming their children “Jon” (see for example, Garfield), when apparently that word is also common slang, in the U.S., for lavatory?

I have other questions too, but you are not qualified to answer them, so there is not point writing them here. There are others who can satisfy my lust for knowledge, and no doubt I will meet them tonight when, as is my habit, I visit the local coin laundry to mingle with the good people who frequent it.

I don’t have any clothes that need to be washed, but if anyone asks I’ll say I’ve come to purchase my dinner from the vending machine within. I don’t want them to know the real purpose of my visit, which is to cleanse the dolphin-juices from my serviettes and tableware. Sadly it is politically incorrect to eat dolphin meat these days. Those of us who have developed a taste for it are considered unkind or cruel. Well, I’m not cruel. I can honestly say, with my hand on my heart, that I have never killed or even raised a fist to a dolphin, not even in the heat of anger.

Not that they don’t deserve it.

Dolphins are among the most environmentally unfriendly creatures on this earth. For one thing, they eat tuna, which as we all know is in very short supply. I tried to get a can of tuna for my lunch yesterday, and the shop had run out because one of these dolphins had been in there shopping a couple of hours previous. For another, they’ve got whiskers. I do not trust any non cat-related creature that has whiskers.

That’s just silly.

Neal’s Belch 189 from Jan 2005

As a former piano player, I appreciate the anger caused by the misuse of a keyboard on the cover of a certain album by The Beatles, the name of which escapes me, on which the band members were to be seen using a keyboard as a sort of mat to cross a muddy road in Winter, in the vein of Sir Walter Raleigh. Although of course he did it much more stylishly.

Sadly, he cheapened his reputation by going on to invent a rather tacky stunt bicycle for children, hence wasting his wonderful talents which he could have put to much more productive uses.

Uses such as, for example, inventing a method whereby footbridges might be built using much cheaper materials and lower labour costs. He really was an asshole to come up with a puddle traversement system and just leave it at that.

Surely it was his duty to share the endless possibilities of this discovery with the world? Think of all the men and women who died building the Golden Gate Bridge, when all along they could have just tossed a giant cloak across the river and barely gotten themselves wet.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Neal has finally run out of ideas for a Belch, and has taken to writing down whatever words spring into his mind, without even caring to consider how they look to the reader. And you’d be largely right about that, but you really shouldn’t think so much. You’ll end up with an oversized brain and then you’ll have to spend money on a new hat, your credit card debt will get out of control, your finances will spiral into a cauldron-like hole in the earth, rather like Dante’s famous seven circles of hell in the book / painting / poem / movie / cartoons “Dante’s Inferno”.

I can never remember which it is, but I’m sure it got rave reviews at the time. Those sorts of things always do, don’t they?

That’s a rhetorical question by the way, but that doesn’t mean you are not obliged to answer it. It just means that I can’t hear you, so I will just have to make a best guess as to what your reply will be, and then let you know whether you are right or wrong.

As it happens, you’re right, but there’s no need to be so cocky about it. Any idiot had a fifty: fifty chance of getting it. It was just a case of picking the right fifty. Not all fifties are the same, you know. Some are a little older and have become discoloured, and fifties manufactured after nineteen ninety are smaller, due to the Irish Central Bank’s efforts to reduce the sizes of coins to make them cheaper.

Then there was that other thing, The Yellow Brick Road, which resulted in a sudden and unmanageable increase in demand for yellow paving, and had appalling economic consequences. Frankly, I don’t care about that, but it’s interesting to note that both Elton John and Captain Beefheart performed songs about the yellow brick road, yet neither were used for the motion picture “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, due to the film-makers having rushed it out decades before these wonderful soundtracks were ready.

And that brings me to my point.

An early 2005 “MatchstickCats.com Editorial”

Picture this.

Two cats walk into a bar. One of the cats spots himself in a mirror, becomes confused and assumes that he is already drunk. He makes his way home, cheefully counting the undimished twenty Euro that he came out with.

The other cat reaches into his fur and realises he has lost all of his own money somewhere between the bus stop and the bar, so he heads out into the street in search of some free entertainment.

Not halfway to the kerb he spot a busker, sitting on a ballister playing some melancholy thing on his harmonica. Noticing the empty whiskey bottle beside the musician, the cat settles himself down on the pavement, right beside the busker’s collection cap and in just the right place to breathe the alcolhol fumes being exhaled from the mouth organ.

It is a little known fact that cats’ brains work better when they are intoxicated.

The reason for this fact being little known, is that it is completely untrue. The cat, however, is not aware of this. And as the whiskey steams around his tiny head and body he starts to ponder the mysteries of the little world in which he lives. He comes to realise that Pi divides into itself exactly once, and is startled at his discovery. Being drunk he fails to realise that it is mindbogglinglingly obvious to anyone with even the most remote grasp of mathematics than any number will divide by itself exactly once, assuming it is offered the opportunity to do so.

Sadly though, so many of our numbers are going through their lives without ever once experiencing the pleasure of being divided, not even by themselves. Strict religious doctrine and suffocatingly conservative goverments have put a stop to this. The resulf of course is a nation of frustrated numbers, who take their unhappiness out on the innocent of our society. Hence the increase in robberies, violent assault and jaywalking that we see in the annual reports published by the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO)

Unfortunately those figures cannot be trusted either, because the numbers are of course themselves criminals. It’s a vicious circle, and it’s radius is pi time it’s radius squared, not that that’s going to help in any way.

But at least now you know.

From 13th Jan, 2005 – Editorial

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “quad etait demonstrandum,” which of course means “Ask not what your country can do for you. Instead, go to a fun fair and win a giant teddy bear called Lucy which takes up half the house and you may even have to get rid of your other bears Harry and Barry, despite them being much more loved and one of them being a gift from your boyfriend who is most upset and offended about the whole thing.”

On the other hand, where I wear my watch, I can tell that the time is fast approaching six o’clock, and that can only mean one thing.

It’s time to turn to cheese. Cheese is the be all and end all of everything. Without it we are mere apes, incapable of making a feast from some mouldy milk, and therefore wasting all of our intellectual advances of the past eight hundred years. I say eight hundred because, of course, that’s the number of years that have passed since the invention of the steam toaster. A fine contraption if ever I saw one, although I should advise you that if you have one of the early models, now is the time to open the bottom flap and empty out the crumbs that have gathered within over the years. You can always use them to make some kind of a stuffing, or perhaps a cheese omelette.

Nowadays of course all the young people have George Foreman grills instead. That man is a genius. All that time when we thought he was being beaten up because of weakness, we didn’t realise he was just in a creative trance in his corner of the ring, busy thinking up new ways to fry pork chops without the fats rolling back in. And besides, just as there are many religions, and many paths to god, we must tolerate these young people who use these fancy contraptions, for there are many ways to a cheese sandwich..

Cheese omelettes are lovely by the way, especially if you add plenty of onions and chickens and things to disguise the taste of the eggs and cheese and stuff. Not that I’ve got anything against eggs or cheese. It’s just that they do not belong together.

Eggs are a breakfast item.

At a stretch they can be used for luncheoning, but let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Cheese cannot be eaten before eight pm. It is a wonderful foodstuff, but it’s use is either as a late night snack – a toasted sandwich perhaps after a night of passionate drinking, or if you must, a cheese and wine party slightly earlier in the evening, of the sort that a colleague of mine used to organise every year. A perrenial cheese event, if you will.

But I won’t.

For I, as the responsible and caring editor of a cat themed website, must remain impartial in all of these matters. I care equally for both Harry and Barry, as I do for Lucy, the oversize fun fair bear won at Funderland last week. Or was it the week before?

I am open to correction. I am also open to omelettes and the cheeses and eggs therein, and will give all of these wonders of the culinary world the benefit of the doubt until I have tried them. This is, after all, a public service website, created to educate and inform you, the humble and ingorant reader, so that you may dare to hope to become less stupid.

And who am I to stand in your way? I don’t want to be the cause of another Tieneman Square, and besides you’re not driving a tank. Just an oversize car. And after all, I’ve always been stone cold rigidly opposed to the idea of two streets or parks or squares in the world being given the same name. There are two many “Chestnut Close”s and “Hillside Park”s and “and “Dargan Street”s for my liking. And I will not contribute to the confusion by creating another “Tieneman Square”. At least not until I have visited the original one and come to a conclusion, one way or another, as to whether or not it is to my liking.