Category: Writings

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.

From November 2004, the first extra edition of Neal’s Belch for IllitPress.com. Run by RazZ and JMW from Niagara Falls, Canada, Illiterate Press was a bit like my MatchstickCats.com of that era but with hipper writers and more swearing. I did my best to fit in.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing but respect for those fine people who work in the cat food industry. Absolutely nothing at all. It’s just that there’s something hypocritical about people who purport to be doing everything within their powers to advance the health and status of cats, yet at the same time they’re killing innocent little fishes, including presumably catfish, and chopping them up to be put into cans. As far as I’m concerned (note to self: must insert gratuitous vulgarity – remember you’re at IllitPress now), this is all a crock of shit.

Several years ago, I, for a short time, worked in one of those factories, just like the one where they make the cat food.

Admittedly we were assembling and packing Christmas Trees, which did not come anywhere near the animal food chain until about ten years after their manufacture, when they finally reached the landfill next door to the cat food company. But that’s not the point.

If you think that that is the point, then you are sadly mistaken. You have allowed yourself to become distracted and perfussed, and you should be ashamed of yourself for losing control of your faculties in such a way. In doing so, you have lost much of the respect and benefit-of-the-doubt which I had previously allocated towards you in my mind. You fucking idiot. (Hey this is easier than I thought.)

I myself never would allow myself to be thrown off topic. Anyway, two cats walk into a sandwich bar.

One of the cats notices the presence of a Catfish sandwich on the menu, and immediately walks out in disgust. He rather kindly spares the other cat the knowledge of it’s presence.

Which is fortunate because the other cat is rather sensitive, and would probably have quite a shock, were he to see something like that. Anyway, in the first cat’s absence, the second cat orders a couple of BLTs and a side order of that stuff that looks like cat’s vomit, which I can never remember the name of but it’s the white messy stuff that you get with salads. What the cat doesn’t know is that in some of the less reputable sandwich bars, the similarity to cat’s vomit is not entirely coincidental.

Anyway, ten minutes later both of the cats are sitting on a wall enjoying their lunch. The first cat has forgotten about the unfortunate menu item, and is tucking into his sandwich. He lifts up the cardboard lid and peeps into the foil box containing the white salady stuff, and recognises yesterday’s dinner.

Fortunately yesterday’s dinner was curried chicken and chips, a particular favourite, so the first cat relishes the opportunity of re-living a previous supper, although he does carry quite a sizeable resentment at having to pay for it all over again. He only hopes that some work went into the re-preparation of his recycled dish, in which case he would feel a little less ripped off.

At this point I feel I should address my own website’s loyal readers who no doubt have stepped over here to see what I’m up to, and are a little surprised. They’re good people, and they’re used to cute little cartoons about talking kittens, and the odd article about nothing in particular.

And now they come here to find me writing about cat’s vomit, and resorting to crude, unnecessary words like “shit”, and “crapface”. Oh wait a minute I haven’t used that one yet. Well anyway, I understand how you feel.

But look at the likes of RazZ. Basically what he does over here is sit down for a couple of minutes, string together a few swear words and a topic of the day, and manage to make you laugh your ass off. It’s genius. Tonnes of people read it. And it’s much, much easier than what I do at the other place. And frankly, I want a piece of it.

I always like to have a piece of things.

I think it’s my natural instincts kicking in. Just yesterday my cat, Harry, was eating a dead mouse, and I couldn’t help myself. I jumped onto the rug and before I knew it, I’d taken a huge bite of fur out of Harry’s ass.

Harry was real pissed. He’d been planning on entering his ass in the local “Cute Donkey” competition, but now that he had a huge hole in his fur, all he was good for was lugging coals home from the shop. That might have been fine twenty years ago, but we’ve got central heating now, and there’s no point filling up the whole house with filthy coal and soot, unless one of the cats is going to get pregnant and develop an insatiable appetite for coal, as I believe some women do. Personally, I wouldn’t ever have a female in the house. They pee all over the place and you have to keep taking them to the vet for jabs and things.

Anyway, till next week, I’m Neal, I’ve found my new spiritual home.

Neal’s Belch no. 167 for 16th Oct 2004

I’ve recently been looking into the possiblity of learning how to play a musical instrument of some kind.

Obviously this is a drastic step but I’ve been bored recently and the winters drawing in, and I have to fill my time up with something. I don’t like, any more than you do, the idea of creating more noise pollution that will further contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer and the change in the climates. If it helps, I’ll try to make sure that whichever instrument I choose is made of an environmentally friendly material such as plastic, so that when it ends up in a landfill it won’t rot and cause a smell.

Anyway I thought maybe the banjo.

Newer readers won’t be aware that some time ago I published an online course that caused a cultural revolution. For those who didn’t partake, here it is again.

NewsBurp University Course NBU-04: How to play the banjo

Although I, your lecturer for course NBU-04, have never played the banjo and have never handled one or read any books on how to play the banjo, I firmly believe that a good teacher can teach anything, regardless of knowledge and experience.

Playing the banjo can be a rewarding and fruitful hobby, in the right hands. In the wrong hands, it can have consequences that lead to the forced evacuation of your town or city, and can result in harsh economic sanctions being placed on your country by the international community.

First some background. In 1976, Christopher Columbus, the grandson of the explorer of the same name, was travelling by car to a second hand record market in Holland, where he hoped to pick up a bootleg copy of the yet-to-be-released unnamed fourth Led Zeppelin album. The one that some ignorant listeners mistakenly refer to as Led Zeppelin 4.

Anyway, on his way he took a brief diversion and inadvertently discovered America. Now, America had of course been discovered several hundred years before that, but everyone in Europe had sort of forgotten it existed. So it came as a complete surprise to find that there was another country at the other side of the big blue water-filled hole where they kept their inflatable matresses.

Suddenly everything made sense. They now knew where all those mysterious unidentified flying aeroplanes (UFAs) were coming from, and why the aliens who travelled in them always spend a couple of weeks harmlessly exploring museums and local McDonald’s branches, before disappearing without even bothering to kidnap anyone.

Anyway, this guy, Columbus Jnr (Jnr. was an abbreviation of Jennifer, a name of which he was not proud, because there was a much loathed serial killer at the time, by the name of Jennifer) , came back from America with a new musical instrument, and a couple of board games. At first people were skeptical.

“That’s pretty much just a violin that’s not made out of cat whiskers, isn’t it?”, they would say. They always said it in those exact words, because the well organised anti-banjo movement used to walk a hundred feet ahead of Columbus wherever he went, handing out cue cards to the locals.

(The anti banjo movement is now a political party, but in the interests of impartiality, the NewsBurp University will not tell you which one.)

Anyway, somehow the proponents of banjoism managed to overcome these hurdles, and nowadays it is rare to walk down a street and see a person who isn’t carrying a banjo. Well, that’s the history bit – let’s get down to learning how to play your banjo.

First, make sure you have oiled your musical instrument.And always adjust the “saddle” before attempting to play it. Now, assuming you’re right-handed, hold the handlebars in your left hand, put your right foot on the left paddle, and gentle push youself down the hill. When you have a momentum going, throw your right leg over the saddle and start peddling, remembering to watch out for traffic coming from behind.

Now you’re well on your w:ay. Well done. You’ve all passed.

After writing that lecture, it occurred to me that I should practise what I preach, so I went to my local musical intruments shop to purchase a banjo. There weren’t very many to choose from, so eventually I settled for a grand piano. Obviously I will have to modify the piano by removing several dozen strings from it until there are only six left. Otherwise it will become very confusing when I start to teach myself chords.

Not that I wouldn’t be up to the challenge of playing a sixty-four string banjo. It’s just that I need to make it portable, because otherwise I won’t be able to get it through the door of my apartment and I’ll have to leave it in the communal hallway where people will see it and mock me behind my back, and I won’t even know that they’re mocking me.

Which will be very frustrating because I hate it when I don’t know what people are up to. Just yesterday my cat was up to something in the back garden, and I knew nothing about it until early this morning when I noticed that the rotary clothes line now spins anti-clockwise in the wind, instead of clockwise.

My cat has always been opposed to forward-moving clocks. I think he’s a bit touchy because he’s on his seventh life, and is finally becoming very conscious of the passing of time. He really should chill out though. Maybe learn to play the banjo or something.

Come to think of it, I bought him a banjo a few years ago. But if I remember rightly, he proudly asserted that his whiskers were much more musical than the banjo strings. He’s always been tremendously proud of his whiskers.

Which is stupid, because it’s not as if he designed them. He is just the lucky cat to whom they have been given, and he has nothing to be proud about. Whoever created them, on the other hand, should stand up and take a bow. They really are quiet remarkable. I’ve hired a cat tuner who visits every few months, and also cleans the chimneys. I might get him to start tuning my piano banjo while he’s here.

Anyway, two cats walk into a bar.

One of them immediately walks out in disgust when he notices that the pub band does not contain a banjo player. The other cat, being more open to new cultural experiences, sits and watches the band while drinking an imported semi-skimmed, semi-pasterised, mixture of goat’s milk and cow’s orange juice.

After a while he remembers a book that he read about the cruel methods used by the manufacturers who extract orange juice from cows. Apparantly they distract the cow by waving a red rag at it and making it feel so proud about the fact that it’s been mistaken for a Spanish fighting bull. While the cow is engrossed in it’s new-found, unfounded and short lived feeling of self esteem, they steal it’s orange juice and replace it with cheap beer.

The cat, on remembering this, stands up in disgust and walks out of the bar.

Where he goes after that is not relevent. I could tell you what he does next, but where would it end? I can’t just sit here describing every minute of the rest of his life That would take years, and I’d get hungry and tired from all the typing and stuff. Get off my back.

Neal’s Belch no. 166 for 11th Oct, 2004

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “quad ete demonstrandum”, which of course means “buyer beware”.

People should always be very careful when buying things. Once, for example, a friend of mine bought a crocodile skin handbag for his wife. It was not untill three weeks later that it emerged that the crocodile was not dead, just in a deep coma. Luckily it didn’t wake up, and his wife simply detached the crocodile from it’s life support machine, which was sewn into the inner lining.

Of course, this raises various ethical questions. But I’m not going to answer those here. I am, after all, not a theologian. I just happen to give off an air of great wisdom and higher knowledge, so people tend to ask me these sorts of questions.

I suppose, in a way, I’m a bit like the doctor who, whenever he goes to the pub, gets asked to look at people’s discoloured tongues and faulty limbs.

When I go to the pub I’m invariably asked which end of the bar the two cats will be sitting at when they arrive. Everybody always wants to sit beside the two cats, because they know from reading this website that when two cats walk into a bar, things are going to happen.

Personally I think it’s sad that people have to live vicarously off the exitement of other patrons in a bar. In my day, we used to create our own entertainment. I remember as a child, being told to stand on top of the televison, my arms outstretched, so that it looked like I was standing on top of the girl on the tightrope on The Paul Daniels Show.

This often backfired, and I was made to look really stupid when the camera shot changed to show a bucket of elephant droppings. My family would shout things like “you’re standing in a bucket of elephant crap, you numbskull”. I of course retained my dignity and explained that I was merely dropping my standards in order to entertain my low brow siblings and parents with the only sort of childish humour that they were capable of understanding.

After that one of them invariably proved me wrong by switching over to Newsnight, and apparantly understanding every word of it. Which doesn’t really make sense to me because “newsnight” is, itself, not a real word.

It was made up by a broadcasting organisation that was too trendy to use real words, so they had to make one up. Of course that all misfired on them when it turned out that by sheer chance, the new word with which they came up happened to look exactly like a combination of the words “news” and “night”.I do hope you’re following this.

Anyway, two cats walk into a bar. One of them drinks some Guinness and nothing much happens to him. The other cat also drinks some Guinness, and nothing of any great interest occurs in his evening, either.

So of course the barman panics, realising that his customers are going to become infuriated when they realise that they are to be deprived of the usual entertainment derived from the two cats’ antics.

He decides to rent a clown for the night.

So the clown turns up, and tells a few jokes but unfortunately he doesn’t do anything cat related. So the audience applaud politely but clearly they are not satisfied at all. And the barman also realises that perhaps if he got out of the habit of referring to them as an “audience”, and just called them patrons instead, they might lower their expectations of their night out, and he would be under less pressure.

But it’s too late, he realised, to worry about that now. Anyway, the barman fails to come up with anything else to entertain the aud- I mean patrons, and many of them go home perhaps twenty or thirty minutes earlier than they otherwise have, due to there being nothing to keep them there.

The upshot of all this was that takings for the evening were around eight percent lower than normal, although the accounts have not yet been signed off on for this year, and that figure is not official.

Neal’s Belch no. 163 for 1st Oct, 2004

I’ve always been fascinated by the ability of seagulls to fly through dry, non salty air which doesn’t even have any fishes swimming around in it.

You don’t see whales doing that. They just beach themselves and wait for the locals to either hire a crane or chop them up into whale fillets while a passing seagull craps happily over them from above. I think it’s something to do with the way they’re brought up. Seagulls tend to be encouraged to leave the nest. By the age of eighteen, your average seagull has moved out from home and is either living at University or in a bedsitingroom apartment somewhere near the big city.

Whales, on the other hand, carry on living in the sea with their extended family for their entire lives.

They dream of leaving, of course. But when there are only seven seas to choose from they are bound to end up living near relatives no matter where they go to. That’s the sad truth about whales and seagulls Although obviously it’s not sad for the seagulls, except the ones who care about whales – but there’s not too many of those.

The seagull is a selfish creature, not given to thinking about the needs of other creatures with whom it is forced, as the seagull sees it, to share the earth. The seagull would be much happier if it had a whole planet to itself.

Seagullworld would be a haven of peacefullness and amphibianity, where nobody ever gets stranded on beaches and the seagulls don’t get made into whale fillets, unless there’s a new young trainee chef on the block who can’t tell the difference between a seagull and a whale, and who also has the ability to fly.

But there aren’t very many of those.

Chefs’ hats, you see, are built to a very un-aerodynamic design. This is done to comply with one of the hygiene regulations, which states that people who work in the preparation of food for public consumption, must wear headgear that is not likely to blow away if a gust of air shoots out from a just-opened oven. A quite legitimate concern, of course, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of making chefs unable to fly, at least while they’re on duty.

Nurses don’t generally have this problem, by the way.

Their hats are much more aerodynamically shaped. Unfortunately, this (mostly female) sector of the medical profession is racked with inhibitions and lack confidence in their flying abilities, so it is very rare, if ever, that you will see a nurse flying over a dead whale and crapping on everybody.

Unlike the good old confident seagull.

Personally, I don’t hardly ever fly at all. When I want to go somewhere that is a particularly long way away from me, I generally hire the services of a commericial airliner and a pilot. I keep the cost down by sharing the aeroplane with a few hundred other paying passengers, and we keep the toilet facilities to a minimum.

Sometimes we splash out and arrange for a motion picture to be shone onto a screen on the inside of the aircraft, if it’s a transatlantic flight like the one I will be taking in a couple of weeks.

In the olden days, before there were planes, people used to have to drive everywhere, and it was a right royal pain in the ass. The car used to get wet and the salt water would damage the paintwork, and sometimes the car would sink, and you’d have to flag someone down and get them to tow you back up to the surface.

There was no such thing as in-car entertainment, either. The local radio stations in the middle of the atlantic are mostly intolerable, producing low brow nonsense aimed mainly at sea horses who like to listen to horse racing commentaries and who spend their days fantasising about the life of their athletic cousins who live on dry land.

For some reason they are envious of land horses, who get to run around a track and who spend their Sunday afternoons hoping they don’t trip over a snail and break their legs, because we all know what happens to horses whose legs get broken, don’t we? If a human breaks a leg, it gets put in a plaster and it’s all fine after a few weeks. But apparently the medical treatment for horses with the same ailment is different, in that they get shot in the head rather than bandaged up.

Neal’s Belch 165 for 7th Oct, 2004

A short, short time ago, in a galaxy not too far from here – unless of course you subscribe to the rather old fashioned linear view of distance and time, in which case it’s gazillions of light years away – two cats walked into a bar. One of the cats was already substantially intoxicated, having partaken in an organised pub crawl earlier in the evening. The other cat was dead, but had been spotted by a taxidermist and stuffed. Unfortunately his fur had become infected with ants and effectively this was a walking ant colony, not a cat. The ants, invigorated by their collective, new-found ability to walk on four legs and get let into a bar disguised as a deceased cat, were taking full advantage of the situation.

Anyway, the first cat – or to be accurate, the only one of the two creatures who can truly and accurately be described as a cat – goes up to the bar and orders a Guinness. It all goes fine, and he gets his Guinness and sits down and it’s nice and we don’t need to worry about that particular cat any more. He had a nice evening and a rather entertaining one too, which he spent watching the other “cat” trying to order a drink.

I say “trying” to order a drink, because when you’re not really a cat but a dead stuffed cat covered in millions of ants, each of whom have individual tastes in beverages, it’s not easy to order a drink. The powerful right wing anti-alcohol lobby in the colony managed to make the most noise, so in the end the “cat” ordered a pint of milk and a cheese sandwich. Although several of the younger anti globalisation ants complained that the idea that cats are partial to cheese, is a stereotype created by the media. But nobody listened because they were hungry, and after all, you don’t get much choice in a pub. Unless you like corned beef, which cats don’t. I know they don’t because I heard it in the media.

Several years later, a dog walked into the same bar. The dog was alive, but infested with fleas, all of whom were thirsty. Luckily, fleas are all brainless and they will buy whatever the the advertisers throw at them. So the dog, who wanted a vodka lemonade, stood in front of a poster advertising vodca lemondade until all of the fleas had seen it and became convinced that the only thing that would make them happy was a serving of that beverage. So that all went fine.

It just goes to show, doesn’t it, that it’s much better to be a live dog infested with fleas, than a dead cat infested with ants. That’s what I draw from the story, anyway. Maybe you’ve read something different into it. And that’s fine. It’s not as if I’m trying to tell you what to think. If I was, I would do it subliminally. D r ink C o ca-Cola. But I don’t. I’ve always found that if you want to convince somebody of something, the best way to go about it is to get them drunk, bring them to a disreputable hypnotist, murder the hypnotist in cold blood and somehow convince the person, when they sober up, that they did it. Then all you have to do is tell them that you’ll keep quiet so long as they agree with everything you say. It’s as simple as that.

Anyway, the two cats had a great time in the end, even though one of them wasn’t a cat. The band were playing Queen songs and they both won t-shirts that said “I’m with stoopid”, and had an arrow pointing to the left. One of them chose to wear his upside-down. partly so that the arrow would point the other way, and partly because his neck was much thicker than his waist and he always wore t-shirts upside down. Which, by the way, was the reason why he was dead. He had, a couple of days before, underestimated the width of his neck when choosing a new collar and tie, and choked himself to death. It just goes to show, doesn’t it, that it’s very important to get measured properly when buying clothing.

By the way I noticed, while writing this several years ago, that “ants” is almost an anagram of “cats”. Almost.