Category: Writings

13th Dec, 2004 – A MatchstickCats.com Editorial

It seems incomprehensible to any ordinary decent person, that parents would insist on forcing their children to eat their “greens” so that they’ll grow up big. For one thing, some of us don’t eat our vegetables and instead consume large quantities of chocolate and beer, yet have still managed to grow to a very substantial size.

But besides that, it’s been clear since the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, that we are going about this nutrition thing the wrong way. Vegetables, the evidence clearly shows, are the cause of some of the worst menaces the world has ever seen. Plant a couple of supposedly innocent beans in the ground, and next thing you know you have a child-eating maniac living at the top of a bean plant in your back garden. And that, we can be sure, is a recipe for disaster. Especially if your cat is sitting there when it starts to sprout.

A cat, when it starts to sprout, really is intolerable. It’s so embarassing trying to explain it to the vet, and besides, most of us don’t even like sprouts. We just eat them because it’s Christmas and you’re supposed to. We, the ordinary people, would far rather be eating a nice plate of melted cheese on toast, and maybe a beer or two to wash it down. It’s very important to wash your cheese down before you eat it. You don’t know what it’s been doing or where it’s been, and there’s no point in taking any chances now is there?

Unless of course you’ve just landed on the “go to jail” box. If that happens, you may as well take a chance card. There’s every possibility that you might get the one that says “Get out of jail free”. One of the writers here at Matchstick Cats much prefers draughts. He has always loved them, with their long necks and speckly coats. They really are the highlight of his trips to the zoo, now that he’s been banned from the wild cats section, after I disguised my he disguised his domestic cat in a lion’s costume to see try to get accepted into the community.

But it was all in the interests of science, and that cat is now the proud mother of three lion cubs who will replenish the zoo’s stock in years to come, when they run out of antelope meat.

You know, that damn butcher is always running out of things. Yesterday he was seen running out of the local bank after allegedly performing an armed robbery.

Luckily we mark all of our banknotes before we lodge our takings into the bank every day, and we were able to check through binocolulars* that none of the money with which he was running away, was the property of this website.

Anyway, two butchers walk out of a bank.

At that very moment, two black cats cross their paths, on their way to a bar. Unfortunately they are still some minutes away from the bar, so they won’t get there on time for a traditional “two cats walk into a bar” story at the end of today’s piece. Sorry about that. It turns out black cats don’t bring good luck if they cross your path in pairs.

The one exception to that, is if you are walking along two parallel paths simultaneously, with one foot on each path. But you have to make sure that each cat only crosses one of the paths. And that’s quite a difficult thing to achieve. Let’s be honest, the only way this is going to happen is if their starting point is between the two paths, and they both walk in opposite directions. And when, if ever, is that going to happen?

Exactly. People are so unrealistic about these things.

Especially holograms. Holograms are so out of touch with reality, Just yesterday a hologram asked one of our staff whether he could have cheese for breakfast. Clearly the fault lies with rushed software releases for the Christmas market, and just plain bad programming at Microsoft.

And that is why this site has recently been re-designed to be best viewed in Mozilla Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer.

A “MatchstickCats.com Editorial” for 13th Dec, 2004

It seems incomprehensible to any ordinary decent person, that parents would insist on forcing their children to eat their “greens” so that they’ll grow up big. For one thing, some of us don’t eat our vegetables and instead consume large quantities of chocolate and beer, yet have still managed to grow to a very substantial size.

But besides that, it’s been clear since the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, that we are going about this nutrition thing the wrong way.

Vegetables, the evidence clearly shows, are the cause of some of the worst menaces the world has ever seen. Plant a couple of supposedly innocent beans in the ground, and next thing you know you have a child-eating maniac living at the top of a bean plant in your back garden. And that, we can be sure, is a recipe for disaster. Especially if your cat is sitting there when it starts to sprout.

A cat, when it starts to sprout, really is intolerablen It’s so embarassing trying to explain it to the vet, and besides, most of us don’t even like sprouts. We just eat them because it’s Christmas and you’re supposed to. We, the ordinary people, would far rather be eating a nice plate of melted cheese on toast, and maybe a beer or two to wash it down. It’s very important to wash your cheese down before you eat it. You don’t know what it’s been doing or where it’s been, and there’s no point in taking any chances now is there?

Unless of course you’ve just landed on the “go to jail” box.

If that happens, you may as well take a chance card. There’s every possibility that you might get the one that says “Get out of jail free”. One of the writers here at Matchstick Cats much prefers draughts. He has always loved them, with their long necks and speckly coats. They really are the highlight of his trips to the zoo, now that he’s been banned from the wild cats section, after he disguised his domestic cat in a lion’s costume to see if it would be accepted into the community.

But it was all in the interests of science, and that cat is now the proud mother of three baby lion cubs who will replenish the zoo’s stock in years to come, when they run out of antelope meat.

You know, that damn butcher is always running out of things. Yesterday he was seen running out of the local bank after allegedly performing an armed robbery. Luckily we mark all of our banknotes before we lodge our takings into the bank every day, and we were able to check through binocolulars* that none of the money with which he was running away, was the property of this website.

Anyway, two butchers walk out of a bank.

At that very moment, two black cats cross their paths, on their way to a bar. Unfortunately they are still some minutes away from the bar, so they won’t get there on time for a traditional “two cats walk into a bar” story at the end of today’s piece. Sorry about that. It turns out black cats don’t bring good luck if they cross your path in pairs.

The one exception to that, is if you are walking along two parallel paths simultaneously, with one foot on each path. But you have to make sure that each cat only crosses one of the paths. And that’s quite a difficult thing to achieve. Let’s be honest, the only way this is going to happen is if their starting point is between the two paths, and they both walk in opposite directions. And when, if ever, is that going to happen?

Exactly.

People are so unrealistic about these things. Especially holograms. Holograms are so out of touch with reality, Just yesterday a hologram asked one of our staff whether he could have cheese for breakfast. Clearly the fault lies with rushed software releases for the Christmas market, and just plain bad programming at Microsoft.

And that is why this site has recently been re-designed to be best viewed in Mozilla Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer.

*those are a bit like binoculars, but spelt incorrectly

Published as Neal’s Belch no. 181, in December 2004, using a previous Belch combined with the contents of a MatchstickCats.com newsetter, apparently.

A number of years ago a man came to my front door and knocked and knocked and knocked until I gradually came to the realisation that he needed me to open it. So I slowly lifted myself up off the sofa, where I had been watching Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and dragged myself all the way across the sitting room and the hall and the porch, where I pressed my nose up against the window and laughed my ass off until the sun went down.

I stopped laughing then because I am incurably terrified of darkness. My entire house is made of glass, and is itself a giant light bulb. You may think that I would feel safe there, but I live in constant fear of the day when the bulb needs changing. It takes weeks and weeks to get a mortgage approved and what the hell am I going to do in the meantime? I suppose I could climb into a tent and light a few candles, but they don’t light up the whole room. I need every inch of my living space to be drenched in light. Otherwise I won’t notice if the bogeyman is hiding in the shadows.

Not that I’m afraid of the bogeyman. It’s just that I was a little rude to him in a pub once, and I’d rather not have to explain myself to him now that I’ve sobered up. I know he’d forgive me instantly but it would be tremendously embarrassing and we’d have to hug or something at the end of it, and us males just don’t do hugging, unless it’s with a cute girl or a cute cat or something. Or a teddy bear of course, but we usually stop that after around age twenty two, because you have to grow up sometime don’t you. I myself have only eight teddy bears left, and almost all of them live in my mummy’s house miles and miles away and I only get to see them when I go home at the weekend. And when I do, they’re usually too tired to do anything, because she drags them around the shops all day and brings them to picnics and Santa’s grotto and the North Pole and the Zoo and the Toothpaste Factory and the horizon in a little green boat.

You know, I remember a time when the North Pole was considered to be too far away to visit on a day trip. Then people realised that the days are longer at the Artic. Or the Antarctic. I can never remember which. So they just set their watches to North Pole time before they left, and kept them on that time for the rest of their lives so that they never ever had to deal with the six days that they had lost somewhere during their journey. If you see somebody running for a bus because they haven’t arrived on time, the chances are that it’s a former Artic / Antarctic explorer.

Arctic Cats are lovely, by the way. They’re all hairy and, unlike Huskies, they don’t fart much because they’re all vegetarians. There’s no point being a Carnivore if you live at the North Pole, because you can’t get any salt there. Ironically, all of the salt water has been frozen to make ice for the Camels to put in their water in the Sahara Desert . Camels prefer ice to water, because it doesn’t swirl about in their humps. It stays still. Anyway where was I?

Apparently you’re not supposed to drink sea-water. The reason they give is that the salt will only make you thirsty, and want to drink more sea-water. What’s the problem? There’s a whole ocean available to you. And if you do manage to drink the whole lot, you will eventually replenish the supply through the body’s natural functions.

We as a society really must stop unquestioningly accepting these so-called old wisdoms. If the wind changes, your face may well stay like that, but maybe you like it that way. After all, that was why you pulled that face in the first place, wasn’t it?

The early bird does indeed catch the worm, but personally I prefer toast and marmalade, so I can live with that.

And as for “Cast ne’er a clout, before spring is out”, I’ll do my clout-casting in whichever season suits me, thank you very much. They don’t even give a reason why you shouldn’t cast your clout before spring is out. You’re supposed to just accept it because it rhymes and because it sounds sort of clever and cultural and Gaelic.

And then there’s the one that goes “A watched pot never boils”. I hope I don’t have to explain to you why that is simply factually inaccurate.

And besides, a pot doesn’t boil. The liquid inside it does. If the pot itself boils, you are an employee of a steel-works, and you have confused your place of work with your kitchen. And if I were you I wouldn’t touch that pot for a while, either. Not unless you want to get burnt to death.

Of course, if you do want to get burnt to death, go ahead, knock yourself out. Or get someone else to knock you out, which might be easier. You could even turn it into some sort of clown act, if you wanted to.

I like clowns.

Neal’s Belch no. 178 for 1st Dec 2004

I’ve always been strongly against the typed word, in all of it’s hideous and satanic forms.

These ones, for example, are being mass produced by a rather ugly and morally decrepit microprocessor chip inside of your computer, and frankly I think you should be ashamed of yourself. Is there nothing that you won’t stoop to in order to shave another few minutes off your working day?

If you had any respect for me as a writer, you would lift up your telephone receiver, listen to the buzzing of the internet as it comes in through your phone line, decipher my words as you listen to it – it’s only a few million bytes, for christ’s sake – and transcribe it with good old fashioned pen and ink.

I’m also strongly opposed to the use of the word “word” itself. I resent having restrictive labels like that attached to each individual and unique unit within my work. They should each have their own name.

The word “word”, for example, should be called Francis. Obviously each instance of the word within my essays would need to be given a new name. You can’t have several Francises running around the page. That would be very confusing. And frankly, rather stupid. And frankly, William has better things to do with himself than be used as a descriptive pronoun of your stupidity.

As indeed do the two franklys, Patrick and Sheila Frankly.

Just yesterday I was having a fascinating theological debate with a local clergyman, about what happens when you delete a word.

He suggested that it was tantamount to murder. And although I didn’t agree, I could understand his argument. However, I replied that at least I don’t go round spreading my pencil shavings on underage words, and then expect to get away with it after a forced apology and compensation payout twenty five years later.

But I digress. I’m also strongly opposed to the spoken word. I feel that it is enormously lazy and common to flush one’s ill-thought out words out through the neck, just seconds after they’ve been conceived. At least have the decency to allow them an hour or two to feed, in your brain, so that they can prepare for birth.

It’s your responsibility as a parent.

These words, for example, have sat on my computer for a couple of days, still attached to the fallopian tube of my mind, which provides them with important spell checks and partial rewrites that will enable them to lead a healthier and more fulfilled life.

That said, I do acknowledge that it can sometimes seem necessary to communicate with people in that rather vulgar and raw way using your vocal chordsa. When you find yourself in such situations, I recommend covering your mouth with a neckerchief or handkerchief, out of courtesy and consideration for your comunicatee.

It is also advisable to record your speech, so that in the event of a medical emergency your doctor can find out exactly which words you’ve been using, and provide the appropriate antidote. Anyway two cats walk into a bar.

One of them is opposed to the use of spoken words, so he hands the bartender an essay which he prepared earlier that day, requesting a pint of milk.

His final paragraph expresses in advance his gratitude to the server. All goes well and he has a wonderful evening. The other cat, the pompous ass, decides that he is good enough to “speak” his order. And that’s where it all goes horribly wrong.

He stumbles and it all comes out wrong, and the bartender mistakes his request (for a pint of Guinness and some peanuts) for a threat to blow up the entire street. The police are promptly called, and it takes many hours to clear up the misunderstanding.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

A Neal’s Belch from 2004

Yesterday I was on my way out of a train station when I noticed something that I had never noticed before. Without exception, every single one of the turnstiles at the exits was set to turn in a clockwise direction.

So I did some research and it turns out that all turnstiles and revolving doors in the northern hemisphere turn that way, while everything south of the equator goes counter-clockwise. Apparently the same is true of the way liquids swirl clockwise or anti-clockwise when you pour them down the sink. For some reason that I can’t quite fathom, the hands on clocks move clockwise no matter what part of the world you are in.

But this got me thinking. What would happen if I started messing with the laws of gravity or magnetism or whatever you call it? Would I get in trouble with the law? Where I come from, if you want to pass a law you must first put yourself up for election to the national parliament, then convince a majority of your colleagues to vote for your proposed piece of legislation. But apparently if you’re Isaac Newton or somebody, you can pass a law just by saying stuff that nobody else understands.

As an aside here, I would just like to pay tribute to all of the scientists throughout the ages who have experimented with apples. I myself once ate an apple right through to the core, and on seeing the hard white flesh near the centre, and thinking about it in silence for a few long minutes, came up with an idea for an essay about turnips for my website. So I can easily see how an apple could provide inspiration for such masterpieces as Newton’s Gravity Yoke, or whatever he came up with.

Really if we’re being fair, we should give credit to the apples, not the scientist. But this is a topsy-turvy world and for some reason it’s always the human, not the inanimate organic food, that gets thanked.

Anyway, back to the laws of science. Now I, as a private citizen, am not empowered to pass a law, for example, that bans television stations from killing selected viewers who change stations during the commercials. However, apparently I am completely free to legislate that “What goes up, must spin three times, freeze for a second like a tense moment in a cartoon, then come down”, and call it “Neal’s Law of Going up and Spinning”, Because that’s science. So I’ve decided that I’m going to take advantage of this new-found power by passing some new scientific laws.

I hereby order that cats cannot land on their feet unless they are covered in orange marmalade and humming the theme tune from Frasier.

That’s enough for now. I don’t want to abuse my privileges.

In fact, in the above short paragraph I’ve achieved pretty much everything I set out to achieve when I decided to go into politics, so I’m going to retire now. I think I can achieve more by quietly campaigning and maybe making a few Euros on the lecture circuit to support myself.

When I was a twelve year old I wanted to change the world. I thought I would become Prime Minister of some country or other, and I would outlaw all crime and remove poverty forever. Then I came to realise that all crime is already outlawed, so I decided to concentrate on a cure for poverty. The solution I came up with was to give everybody a large quantity of money and order them not to spend it. Then nobody would ever be poor ever again and we would all live happily ever after. Just like in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Although Goldilocks, of course, would never have dreamed of putting orange marmalade on her cat’s paws. And this refusal to conform with the norms or our society would mean she is now guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal under my new “Orange Marmalade Humming Act, 2004”, referred to earlier.

But you shouldn’t take from this that I am a staunch conservative who wants to hang all criminals and then put them in jail after they’re dead.

No.

All I’m saying is that it’s fun to make laws that annoy people, especially those who have cats or who refuse to keep a minimum level of marmalade in stock.

You know, these are the same people who you see at polling booths, scratching their heads and trying to make a last minute decision about who to vote for. My country now has colour photos on the ballot sheet, so you can pick which candidate has the best hair, and vote for him or her without having to find out who they are or what they stand for.

So it’s not all bad.

And I never said it was. I’m not a glass-half-empty person. It’s not empty until I shove the flat, day-old coke from last night down my parched throat at seven o’clock the next morning because I don’t have time to make coffee.

Then it’s empty. And that brings me nicely back to the hemispheres / clockwise / anticlockwise thing. Because there’s going to be nothing left in the glass to throw down the sink and test which way it swirls as it disappears down the drain.

So now we’ll never know.

Neal’s Belch no. 175 for 20th Nov, 2004

I’ve been toying with the idea of giving up alcohol permanently, and substituting it with sweets or something. I find that I’m becoming addicted to it’s medicinal qualities, and rarely does a week go by when I don’t “accidentally” get a bruise on my knee, and dab it with an alcohol soaked squab to disinfect it.

Experts believe that there is a particular pore behind our knees which, when exposed to sunlight, can lead to us feeling happier. This is unfortunate for me, because the last thing my knees need when they’re hung over, is the sun shining down on them.

I’ve always found, though, that alcohol makes me happy. It may be because beer cans here in Ireland come with a Dilbert comic printed on them, or it may be that I’m a raving alcoholic. Either way, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s time to grasp the bull by the steering-wheel, admit that I have a problem, and go to AA Ireland and ask them whether they’ll reduce my motor insurance premium if I stop drinking.

The Automobile Association has always been a fine refuge for those of who like to drink. Before I finally collapse for the night, I always make sure to fall into a car that has an “AA Member” sticker on the windscreen. For one thing, I love the yellow and black logo. And it may interest you to know that I’ve deleted a rather poor bit here about a Russian cartoon that used to be shown on Irish television in the nineteen eighties. But besides that, it’s always lovely when I wake up with a massive headache, and all I have to do is call up a mechanic to fix the window that somehow got broken during the night.

He usually turns up within half and hour and brings tea and doughnuts, so that’s breakfast taken care of. I’ve thought about asking them to bring a change of clothing too, but recently I’ve found that if I just concentrate, I can aim the other way and I don’t get any vomit on them at all usually.

It’s very important, when reclaiming your body from alcohol and becoming a teetotaller that you cleanse out your body by having plenty of fruits and juices and healthy crap like that. For that reason, I’ve taken to drinking a lot of apple juice.

Well I did, that is, until last night, when there was a documentary on the Discovery Channel about fruit juices. I didn’t see it, but it was in the TV listings, and apparently it said that apple juice is pretty much the same as cider. Since cider comes in larger cans than traditional apple juice, I’ve decide to switch to cider. That way I’ll get even more apple juice into my system, and it won’t be long until I’m permanently “dry”.

I’ve always been a great admirer of the Discovery Channel, ever since I discovered it. There is now nothing that I don’t know about how zebras fuck each other in the wilderness. And my life is all the better and richer for it. I’ve learned an awful lot from these programmes, and have put much of it into practice. Yesterday I took a little trip to the zoo on the way home, and had a great time. They sell lovely ice-cream there, too.

That reminds me. Many of you probably have probably always assumed that ducks don’t care if there’s a huge Noah-style flood. This is rather shortsighted of you. When the water level rises to the highest mountaintops, as it did in biblical times, the ducks have to swim at a much higher altitude than normal, unless they manage to get their hands on some stand-by tickets for a passing ark.

Obviously during Noah’s kick ass biblical flood, oxygen tanks were at a premium, but Noah had to supply them to every duck on the planet. Otherwise, what you would have had was an ark with hundreds of ducks swimming around beside it, quacking sarcastically and making Noah look ridiculous, by implying that they were managing to survive without any help from him whatsoever. At least if he supplied the oxygen tanks Noah could take credit for their ongoing good health, and not look like an idiot.

Obviously this ate into Noah’s costs quite a bit. He cut back by not having any cats on board. As a result, all of the cats which we have in the world today are completely free of sin, as they are all descended from cats who were born after the flood, which according to the bible was sent to kill off all the evil cats in the world.

That’s why cats are always licking themselves, by the way. They were born at a time when there was still a lot of dampness around after the flood, and so they are not used to being dry, and have to cover themselves with saliva to make themselves feel normal. For the same reason, cats are very uncomfortable with the idea of using anti-perspirants. They just can’t stand being dry.

Till Wednesday, I’m Neal for IllitPress of Canada, and I’m seriously thinking of getting a cat.

Neal’s Belch no. 173 for Nov 14th, 2004

I’ve always had a problem with the popular music artist, Sting. It’s nothing to do with the fact that he’s a former teacher, who should be able to articulate himself with more sophisticated sentences that “De do do do de da da da”. No, I’m fine with that. Even though my spell-checker hates it.

If artists feel the need to express themselves using media other than the language which their parents and teachers have worked hard to instil in them since childbirth, then I suppose they must be allowed to do so.

After all, this is a free world, and those of us who wish to stray from the herd of sheep and hang out with one of the local badgers for a while, should be permitted to do so. Besides, I’ve always thought that sheep and badgers look good together. And I’m not suggesting that the two should necessarily mate. There’s more to life than sex, you know. Some of us realise that you can get almost as much enjoyment out of having a chat with a badger while leaning on the gate at the end of the field, as you can from an orgasm. And that brings me to my difficulty with Sting.

For several years now, that man has, according to the tabloid press, been a proponent of the pastime known as tantric sex. For those who are too young and innocent and stupid to know what that means, it involves going to a cinema with a nice person, and making the popcorn last all the way through the first half of Lawrence of Arabia, the twenty minute interval, and possibly the second part of the movie too.

The trouble with this is that Sting is so named because, as a child, he wore a yellow and black striped article of clothing, and looked like a bee.

Now bees, as you know, die after they sting you. They are not able to make themselves last a long time, and if Sting really had the characteristics of a bee, he would be a lot more likely to concentrate on the movie. He would most likely decline the aforementioned snack food.

As would I, but in my case it would be on health grounds. I’ve never liked popcorn much myself. I don’t care much for the taste, it’s full of cholesterol, albeit good cholesterol.

By the way I’ve always been most impressed at the way scientists, to avoid having to invent a new word, just called it “good” cholesterol. I think the same principle could be applied by parents who want to name their children Hitler.

Up to now, this has always been a problem, as the name carries with it a lot of baggage. But under this system the child could be called Good Hitler on the birth certificate, and just Hitler for short. Then everybody would be able to tell the difference between the long deceased war mongering dictator, and Junior.

Many of you may not be aware that I used to work as a secretary to a war mongering former dictator. I too am unaware of this.

As far as I’m concerned, it is a vicious rumour made up by myself in order to fill up a paragraph in an article, after I ran out of things to say about tantric popcorn. Although admittedly I am able to touch-type, and would be well qualified to assume such a role.

However, in my day having good keyboard skills did not amount to a crime against humanity.

Apparently it does now. I only recently found out that the reason why the United States refused to sign up to the international war crimes convention a couple of years ago, was because the President was under immense pressure from the Secretarial Guild of North America, who were afraid that administrative assistants all over the world would be arrested and brought before a court in Switzerland or something.

Anyway till Wednesday, I’m Neal from MatchstickCats.com and IllitPress, and my fingers know the layout of my keyboard like the back of their hands.

Circa 2004

Somewhere in another time and place, over a rainbow far away and beyond anywhere that even the intricate human mind is equipped to take us, two cats walk into a bar.

One of the cats immediately orders a pint of Guinness, then sets about turning the creamy head with a spoon, hoping that it will metamorphisise into cheese. Not the type to ever relax and forget about work, he’s trying to create some cheese to use back at the laboratory, where the mice that he experiments on from nine to five, are getting hungry. He’s not planning to feed them. It’s just that he wants to wave some cheese over their cages and see what happens, all in the interests of science, and the advancement of the human race.

By using the phrase “human race”, I have of course given it all away.

It is now clear to you that the fictional cat, to whom I allocate human characteristics, is in fact a human. It’s a metaphor. An artistic indulgence, if you will, created to add colour and life to this otherwise dull story of mice and cheesecakes.

The other cat is not a drinker, so he orders a couple of slices of whiskey cake. While looking at the menu, he notices that they serve cheese cake, and he thinks about telling the other cat but by the time the thought processes have made their way around his unsophisticated brain, the alcohol fumes from the nearby whiskey cake have taken their toll, and our cat number two is out for the night.

Meanwhile, outside, their friend is standing looking irritated, and wondering why he always has to be the reserve cat in these stories. He seriously considers starting a campaign to ban pubs from restricting cats to two at a time, but after a few minutes he finds a ball of string on the ground, and spends the evening playing with that instead.

And that brings me to my point. It has always, always been a source of bafflement to me, how they manage to make string so long. I have never seen a sheep with a sixty metre hair on his back. And believe me, I should know.

In the early nineteen eighties I worked for the Irish Secret Service, and my job was to try to find out why Hollywood insists on making films with leprechauns in them. My research, of course, brought me on the trail of a fairy ring, in a mountainous area populated by sheep farms and terrorist hideouts. Leprechauns, as you’ll know doubt know, only appear in spaces of between two and seven feet in width, and in cheap Hollywood movies aimed at people whose great grandmother once accidentally visited Ireland and thought she was born there.

So in each area that I visited, I would calculate the average distance between the sheep as they grazed, and try to determine whether a two to seven foot open space existed between them at most times.

Anyway, since I seem to be a little short of further things to say today, how about a little of what we all know you people come here for. Poetry.

I wandered lonely as a wasp
That floats on high o’er veils and hills
And gets spotted by a wasp hunter
Who lifts his gun, takes aim and kills

I strolled and pondered why we’re here
And clocked up several hours of thinking
Eventually my mind did clear
And into logic I did peer

Clear as a bell it all became
My doubts they did begin to wane
Just in case, I reconsidered
But clarity was still unhindered

It’s obvious it seemed to me
A lower species we must be
Otherwise why would we begat
Eight lives less than the humble cat?

Cultured readers can find a whole page of fine poetry here.