Category: Writings

Neal’s Belch no. 164 for 5th Oct, 2004

Several years ago I was walking along my local river bank, checking out the security system and making draft plans for an upcoming bank robbery that I might be involved in, when I noticed a funny thing.

A clown was sitting on a large rock just under the bridge, throwing custard pies at his imaginary friend and sounding the horn on his battered old car. Now, you may think that’s a little corny, and I’m inclined to agree, but I burst out laughing nevertheless.

And as a result I was arrested for scaring a small child who was passing at the time. While I was languishing in the police cell an inmate taught me how to pick locks with my toenails, so obviously I decided I was never going to cut them again.

Soon after, I rented a stall for the weekend at my local outdoor market and offered all of my toenail scissors for sale to the general public. I had intended to use the proceeds to pay back a friend who had put up the bail money, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a profit. This was mainly due to the exhorbitant and prohibitive cost of primetime television advertising slots here in Ireland.

Not being one to give up, I invested my hundred Euro losses in a consolidation loan. Unfortunately I inadvertently used the same bank that I had been seen acting suspiciously in a few days before, and I somehow ended up in jail again.

This time I decided that if any other inmate offered to teach me a usefull skill, I would immediately jam both of my forefingers in my ears and sing the loud rock part of “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the top of my voice to avoid acquiring any information that could get me into further trouble. Unfortunately this tactic caused me not to hear the screws banging on the door with my meals, and as a result I ended up in hospital being treated for malnutrition.

The hospital staff were lovely, I must say, and I felt very well looked after.

They even cut my toenails and offered to direct me to a store where I could replenage my supply of toe nail clippers and get back to where I was before I made my foolish mistakes. Sadly they didn’t tell me that I would have to pay for these instruments.

So I ended up back in jail for shoplifting. While I was languishing in the police cell an inmate taught me how to pick locks with my toenails, so obviously I decided I was never going to cut them again.

For that reason, I rented a stall for the weekend at my local outdoor market and offered all of my toenail scissors for sale to the general public. I had intended to use the proceeds to pay back a friend who had put up the bail money, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a profit.

This was mainly due to the exhorbitant and prohibitive cost of primetime television advertising slots here in Ireland.However, I had such a headache from the stress of going bankrupt that I went to the doctor.

It was nothing serious, I’m glad to say.

But he did say that I had a tendency to get my stories confused and sometimes even repeat things as if they had happened more than once in my life. Apparently it’s a bit like “deja-vu”, except that you don’t know it’s happening until a doctor points it out to you.

Anyway the following day, I went to the doctor, because I had a headache from the enormous stress of having gone out of business. Luckily, it was nothing serious. And he just gave me some pills.

From 2004 or thereabouts

You could do a lot worse than to live your life by the dictum “Es orilles agoraphobia”, which, as you are no doubt aware, means “Drink water until the fishes no longer have a home”.

That said, many of us find sea water to be a little too fizzy for our. tastes. I, for example,  have gone to great lengths to ensure that our home’s water supply comes from an inland source. I decided to have the courage of my convictions, and one day  just rang up the water company and demanded that they connect me to a non salt reservoir.

To my surprise, it turned out that I was pushing on an open door.

Not only did they give in to me without an argument, but the telephone operator promised to disconnect me from all sea water sources at the push of a button, within the hour. I was most impressed.

I’m now seriously considering venturing into the utilities business on my own. My idea is to drill for home heating gas in one of the lakes around here, then become a supplier of water and gas through one single pipe, from the same source. The efficiency savings will be enormous, and not only that, the gas could be used to heat your bath water in the pipes before it even reaches your house.

The other alternative that I have in mind is to go into fish farming. I will specialise in oily fish, but unlike other manufacturers I will heat the oil in the factories, and sell hot cooked sardines in tins to those whose lives are too busy to go around heating fish.

After finishing their sardine meals, customers will then have the option of pouring the oil into their central heating system and, assuming they eat sardines eight times a day, they’ll be saving a fortune on household bills.

I’ve always been baffled at the way the sardine industry works.

They are so set in their ways, and seem determined to carry on their age old practice of picking tiny baby sardines that are so small, they have to put a dozen or more in each tin. Many of them don’t even have a business class section any more, so no matter how far your company’s travel budget is prepared to stretch, you have no choice but to be squashed in with your ten or twelve siblings as you make your way home, without so much as an in-flight movie to keep you entertained.

Smoked Salmon manufacturers, on the other hand, wait until the fishes have grown nice and big and tall, then put them on a diet so that each salmon is tall and wide but very flat, and can be squeezed into an easy-to-transport flat vacuum pack, and brought by rail or road to it’s destination.

In my youth I spent a Summer working as a packer of artificial Christmas trees in a local factory, and if I took anything away from that job, it my ever present awareness of the irony of turning real trees into cardboard boxes, then putting fake trees into the boxes. It really does make you think. It also makes your arms very tired, so I left after a few weeks.

Nowadays of course kids refuse point blank to eat pork,  dolphins or sharks for dinner, thanks to movies like “Babe”, “A Shark’s Tale” and “Free Willy”,

Parents are so desperate to get their offspring to consume something healthy, that they have taken to disguising sardines as Gingerbread Men, just like the one in the fairy story. Let’s hope to hell Disney don’t try to turn that into a cute little movie.

Walt, ironically, had his entire body cryogenically frozen on death, because of his obsessive fear that his corpse might, against his wishes, be fed to pigs after his demise. Pigs of course are renowned for their inability to eat frozen food, and the late animation creator remains intact to this day.

Neal’s Belch no. 162 for 25th Sep, 2004

Yesterday I was walking along, looking up at the clouds as I always do, when I noticed that one of them was leaking.

White fluffy stuff was falling from it and drifting all over the sky, and kids were excitedly trying to catch it and make it into pillow case stuffing, a product for which there is a huge black market in Ireland.

Anyway, the fire brigade turned up of course, and sorted everything out.  But while they were there, I noticed the hose that they used to spray the cloud and make it float away to another fire brigade’s jurisdiction so that it became somebody else’s problem, was made of rubber.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but rubber is highly toxic and flammable isn’t it? That’s just stupid. What they need to do there, if you ask me, is put a load of holes in the hose, then dip it into a lake so that the lake water will get into the hose and put out the fire that will undoubtedly have been raging inside the hose from the moment it was manufactured.

I’m glad I put my mind to that particular problem. I love coming up with solutions to things. Yesterday a dog with three legs was trying to climb up a tree in my immediate locality, and was clearly having great difficulty doing it. This despite the best efforts of the marvellous people who work in the field of veterinary research. I’m afraid the bandage just wasn’t enough. So I helped the poor little doggy out by chopping down the tree so that it lay horizontal on the ground and he could explore it to his heart’s content.

Anyway back to the clouds.

One of them happened to be shaped like a big gorilla, a phenomenon which scares quite a lot of people, but not me becase I am a gorilla. I took it as an enormous compliment to my species that a few million water droplets chose to unite in a tribute to my kind, before dispersing like a group of ballet dancers readying themselves for the next act. I’ve always been a great admirer of the ballet. Although I must say I find the swans in the  lake at my  local park to be far below the standards set by the genre.

The ducks, on the other hand, are excellent. But that’s probably because they get plenty of incentives from the breadcrumbs that get thrown at them as rewards.

Nobody ever throws bread crumbs at swans because they’re afraid they will choke or something. Swans are just too delicate, I find. I’ve broken several of them through normal day to day use.

Human ballet dancers, on the other hand, take enormous offence if you offer breadcrumbs to them. People really are ungrateful assholes sometimes. Maybe it’s just me, what with being a gorilla and all that, but I have never had a “thank  you” or even a polite smile or a bow from a ballet dancer after I gave them breadcrumbs. Maybe it’s because they’re stale or something, I dunno. Although if that’s the case they could easily cover it up with some moisturising cream.

I’ve never understood why moisturising cream cannot be shipped out to drought-ridden countries to make them wet. Instead, this marvellous creation gets wasted on women’s faces, where it’s not needed.

What is this obsession people have with remaining moist at all times?

Neal’s Belch no. 161 for 13th Sep, 2004

Yesterday I was queueing up at my local bank, hoping to get my hands on some leaflets and lodgement forms because I collect them as a hobby, when all of a sudden there was a loud scream of “Help. Help. My Sandwich”.

Needless to say I pushed the onlookers out of the way and made my way to the centre of the crowd, letting everybody know that I was available to assist.

It turned out that the bank porter had solved an “across” clue on his crossword, but in doing so had unfortunately found that an interlinked “down” word was obviously incorrect, because it no longer fitted. Apparently the poor unfortunate man had gambled his luncheon sandwich (corned beef and cheese on dry white toast) on being able to solve the crossword, and the bank manager had now won it off him.

Corned beef is completely unsuitable for toast. You have to put it in a soft bap or a crusty french roll. Nothing else. People really need to be taught sandwich making in schools, maybe as part of a home economics class. We can’t have, in a civilised society, people assembling their sandwiches incorrectly.

Anyway, I’m fine with corned beef if it’s in the right context, but one thing I won’t tolerate at all is an uncarpeted basement stairs. These, as far as I’m concerned, are highly dangerous and should be banned and replaced with ladders. When you climb down a ladder there are no complicated steps in your way, just a few simple narrow rungs. So there is very little chance of you getting confused and forgetting where your feet go or losing sight of the handrail. And If the ladder falls over while you’re on it, you still reach your desired destination. Unless of course you’re on your way upstairs.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand this. I’ve just added a “two cats walk into a bar” story to the end of today’s Belch, which will explain my point in an easy to understand analogy about a cat walking down a stairs to a basement. But that’s all to come later.

As you may have noticed, most of today’s Belch is filler. I’m kind of short of material at the moment, but I’m determined nonetheless to fill up the height of a medium laptop screen and just beyond, as I usually do.

I like to give value for money. After all, you’ve paid a lot for your computer. But rest assured I’ve invested the proceeds wisely. Yesterday I bought a left handed artificial right hand. Those of us who are left handed have to keep up with the latest trends, and right hands that work in a left handed fashion are going to be the “in” thing this Autumn, I’m sure of it.

How are we doing for space? Another paragraph, I think. Two cats walk into a bar.

One of them immediately runs behind the bar counter, because he works there and he doesn’t want to keep the other cat waiting and damage his business After all, it’s taken him years to build up a reputation, and there’s no point throwing it all away just so he can continue talking to the other cat about Itchy and Scratchy.

The other cat asks him for a Guinness. The bar cat says the Guinness keg is empty and it might take a few minutes, to which the other cat replies that that’s fine, he’s not in a hurry anywhere and he’ll wait.

The bar cat then quietly curses under his breath because he doesn’t want to have to go all the way down to the basement, especially since the ladder has been replaced with a carpeted stairs, and he hates those. He finds them so confusing, with their vertical bits and horizontal bits. He never knows which to use. He wants to travel down in a gentle slope, not horizontally or vertically.

Besides, it’s dark down there, and he’s a black cat so nobody will see him if he crosses their path, which means a tonne of precious good luck will go to waste.

Okay, I think thats it.

Neal’s Belch no. 160 for 10th Sept, 2004

The trend in the elephant world these days appears to be an upward one.

Every aspect of the species, from it’s cholestoral level to the height of the branches that it can reach with it’s long neck, is rising to unprecedented levels. And we all know what’s going to get the  blame, don’t we?

Greenhouse gases. Well let me tell you something. I have a greenhouse in my back yard and there are absolutely no elephants breaking through it’s glass ceiling whatsoever. Except the male ones of course. I’ve tried and  I’ve tried but no matter how many incentives I offer – flexitime, a twenty four hour creche in the garden shed  – I can’t get female elephants to work in my greenhouse.

But enough of my problems. Yesterday I was walking around Dublin Zoo, hoping to steal a banana off one of the monkeys so that I could send it to a monkey who I sponser in the third world, when I noticed that the cats in the zoo are substantially bigger and scarier than my own cats at home.

Obviously it has something to do with diet. So I investigated a little further and found out that wild cats like to eat wilderbeast and reindeer.

So obviously my next stop was Santa’s Grotto.

Sadly, he wasn’t home, and I didn’t want to go taking his reindeer to feed to my cat without asking his permission first. I’m a great believer in manners. You can’t just take sombody’s reindeer to feed to your cat, no matter how important you might think that cat to be, without first at least pretending to show some interest in their feelings on the matter.

I always say please and thank you no matter how ungrateful I am.

Last night I said thank you to my cat for bringing a dead bird into the house. He was very proud because he had shot it down with his new tranquiliser gun. In case you’re worried the bird was unharmed, just a little drowsy. Cats aren’t evil, you know,

They just have urges that have to be catered to and facilitated. I knew a cat once who liked to play Bugs Bunny and burrow under our garden. Unfortunately I had to put a stop to it when he set up an illegal unlicensed subway train service running through the burrows, but if it weren’t for that I would have happily continued to tolerate it.

I mean, who am I to interfere with the life of a cat, who’s happily minding his (or her) own business, just trying to make a living for himself? I think as long as they submit proper accounts under financial reporting legislation, and obey all the relevent rules and procedures, cats should be left to their own devices to carry on wtih whatever it is that they want to do.

I’m sorry to go on about this but sometimes when you feel strongly about something you have to climb up on your high horse, adjust the saddle, straighten the rear view mirror and drive off, headlights dipped in case you blind somebody who’s walking the other way because he fell off what he had thought was a high horse but turned out to be a small camel with a disfigurement that caused his back to be unusually straight, so he didn’t have a give away hump.

Which means of course that it’s perfectly understandable really that he could have been mistaken for a horse. Unless you take into account that they guy who chose him was supposedly a veterinary expert, whose PHD theses was “The.differences between high horses and small malformed camels”.

Anyway on a lighter note, I’ve been practicing writing blues lyrics recently, and I’m glad I did because I came up with some really cool stuff:.

I’ve got the cold piano fingers blues
I’ve got them bad
Been sitting here on this plastic fake leather stool

I’ve got the bananas won’t stay fresh blues
Been sitting here trying to assemble a sandwich with the aforementioned decomposing fruit disappearing before my very eyes
It almost makes me cry
But the moisture would rot the banana more
Wouldn’t it
Dammit

(guitar solo)

(guitar solo continues)

(guitar solo continues)

(short and rather inappropriate drum solo due to an excess of alcohol)

(fades)

(needle skips to track thirteen, “Monkey Puzzle Blues”)

I’ve been trying to assemble baby
This old monkey jigsaw thing
But the head don’t fit
Sorry I mean won’t fit
Mustn’t abandon my standards of grammar
Just cos I got the bad ol’ monkey puzzle blues

Been trying to get into the monopoly business lately
The ol’ get out of jail cards they do attract me
But I gotta finish this damn monkey puzzle first
I hate unfinished business
Like that time when I borrowed some fish off one of good ol’ Jesus’ disciples and forgot to give it back
So he didn’t have enough for the people he was preaching to
Luckily he was able to do some magic
Hence the parable of the loaves and fishes
Anyway this puzzle is pissing me off

(record needle inexplicably skips back to original song)

I’ve got the can’t think of anything to write for a belch at the moment blues
Been sitting here trying to come up with some drivel to write which is why I’ve resorted to this stuff for the second time
Although the first time it was in a newsletter not a belch
Admittedly
Oh woe is me
Although one of my readers was so impressed at the newsletter that he thought they were real Muddy Waters lyrics
Which must mean I’m a genius
So it’s not so bad
I don’t have the blues no more

Dammit the blues were going to be my livelihood man now I’ll have to take up yodelling

Hang on a minute though that makes me blue
So that’s okay after all
Or is it?
Dammit I just don’t know any more
Oh-ohhhhhhhhhhh-Oh yeah

(song abruptly ends as if singer has just realised there’s nobody reading. I mean listening. Nobody listening)

Neal’s Belch no. 159 for 8th Sept, 2004

Many of you may be aware that I recently changed my favourite colour from red to orange, in order to realign my visual tastes with my food preferences so that my favourite colour is now the same as my favourite flavour.

And I know what you’re thinking. If I ate blood oranges, I could have remained loyal to the colour red while still enjoying orange coloured foodstuffs. The problem is, blood oranges taste like urine. And that happens to be one of my least favourite flavours. I avoid urine flavour ice creams and crisps like the plague.

Although come to think of it that doesn’t entirely make sense. I don’t avoid the plague. I don’t have to, because it has never threatened me or come after me as far as I know. Me and the plague have never crossed swords.

Not that I’m friends with the plague, it’s just that it’s been sensible enough not to start an argument with me, so I’ve had no reason to get upset. No matter how much I may dislike the plague, if I were to start a fight with it today I could quite rightly be described as agressive and a trouble-maker.

Anyway, now that I’ve nailed my colours to the mast as regards colours and flavours, I may as well go the whole hog and reveal my favourite breakfast cereal. It’s Frosties. Known in some countries as Frosted Flakes, but always featuring Tony the Tiger on the box.

Obviously the cat is part of the attraction. But I also love the idea that brave cereal manufacturers traipse out into the street at four o’clock every morning to gather frost and dew with which to coat my corn. It makes a welcome change from the usual mass manufacturing of cereals that goes on in most places. There just aren’t enough hand-made breakfast items in the world today.

Take for example toast.

Now, here in Ireland toast is delivered by the milkman at some ungodly hour, and if you get up too late it’s gone soggy. I’ve got round that problem by ordering dry toast, and adding the butter later when I’m ready to start eating it. But this is a busy world, and I’m only too well aware that many people do not have time to be spreading dairy items on their cooked bread first thing in the morning.

I suppose at this stage I should propose some kind of solution to this problem, but I’m not a paid journalist and I can’t see what’s in it for me.

And frankly, I don’t think this Belch is much good. I suppose I could delete it and start again but these essays are my babies and I’m never going to do that. Instead, I’ll just carry on and hope that my self-deprecating comment here has made the reader warm to me. Actually I’m quite warm myself at the moment. I bought an excellent new electric fire today The second that I touched the match to it the whole room felt like a furnace.

I love that word, “furnace” by the way.

It derives of course from two words, “fur” and “ace”, and first came into common parlance after Dick Whittington’s legendary cat won a game of strip poker and got to keep his fur, thanks to a hidden Ace of Clubs which his owner had very kindly hidden in his cat’s ass. I’m sorry to be vulgar, by the way. I don’t like to talk about putting things up cat’s asses, but no matter how much I thought about it I just couldn’t think of another place on a cat’s body where a playing card could be concealed.

Although I’ve just realised that Dick Whittington’s cat’s “ass” is probably a donkey, not a part of the cat’s anatomy. I hate the way some words have two meanings. It’s so confusing sometimes.

Maybe I should have written about a mixed breed cat who’s mother had mated with a kangaroo and who therefore had a pocket. But I don’t like to be too silly. You lose credibility if you go off on tangents like that, and you start to look less professional.

Then before you know it, you’re a circus clown.

And let me tell you, face paint is very difficult to remove. It gets stuck to fur and and you get fined for animal cruelty and people start to lower their opinion of you. Then you end up having blood oranges for breakfast because the citrus is good for disolving paint, and it’s way too late for that because I’ve already changed my favourite colour by deed-pole, and there’s no turning back.

The point is, when I arrived back into the cinema, I noticed a sign saying “Please do not enter through the emergency exits”. So I immediately went to look for the manager so that I could apologise for any trouble that I may have caused. The man didn’t seem too bothered, but I offered to help out on the popcorn stand for a couple of weeks to make up for it.

The next fortnight was one of the happiest times of my life. All day long I made popcorn and coated it with sugar or salt or artificial sweetener, and listened to the movie goers complaining quietly to each other about the quality of the snacks being sold by some Irish guy who apparently sells popcorn at a stand somewhere near or in the cinema.

I can’t seem to think of anywhere else to go with this story, so lets just say that at the end of the two weeks I went home and discovered that Goldilocks had stolen my corn flakes, and I can’t tell you the rest because it’s the subject of an upcoming court case.

I’ve never been to court myself. Well except that one time when I was a juror in the trial of O.J. Simpson, but apart from that, no.

I brought my teddy bear Bowsy with me and the guy who counts the jury members’ votes accidentally mistook Bowsy’s paw for a juror’s hand, when I lifted it up to wave at OJ. So that might have messed up the vote count a little.

But these things happen. I understand there was a similar incident in Florida a few years ago during a U.S. presidential election. Here in Ireland the last two presidential elections have been won by women, and only one out of the five candidates last time was male. And he didn’t even do well. There was a sixth candidate but he dropped out before polling day, after it was alleged that he was a bear.

The media destroyed him and called him a “damn picnic-basket stealing forest-dweller”, and despite there being very little solid evidence, he was left with no choice but to quit.

Sadly the presidency is not that big a job here. The head of goverment does all the important stuff and the head of state, the president, just does the washing up and stuff and signs bills. A bit like the Queen of England, but without the beheadings and castles and things. Ironically, the president does get to live right next door to Dublin Zoo, which has bears.

So anyway Goldilocks pretty much cleared out my kitchen. And poor Bowsy and Ullysses were left in tears with no porridge, but that’s mainly because they hadn’t bothered to make any. My bears prefer toast. And who wouldn’t? I think we need to do something about the stereotyping of bears as porridge eaters.

It really does nobody any good to make up lies like that just to satisfy our lust for simplicity and goodliness. I think we should counteract all this by starting a rumour that bears enjoy heroine and prostitutes. That’ll balance it all out.

At the very least they’ll be able to sue us and make enough money out of it to compensate for having their houses broken into by Godilocks. In the meantime, lets at least all try to keep an eye on anybody who’s name begins with “G”, and make sure they’re not stealing breakfasts from local forest animals who live in houses.

Anyway, where was I? Well, I was right here, lying on my bed typing. But in a moment I’ll be in the toilet, wishing I could have come up with something better for today. And urinating my life away.

Neal’s Belch no 157 for 3rd Sept, 2004

Two cats walk into a bar. One of them is under the illusion that he’s an ox, so he orders a pint of Oxbow, whatever that is.

As for the other cat, I’m surprised he even went into the bar at all in the first place. He’s one of those cats who has not developed any human-like characteristics, and normally just does ordinary cat things like climbing onto roofs and playing with dead mice. Still, it’s nice to have a surprise every now and then isn’t it.

As it happens, it turns out that the cat was short sighted, and thought it was a “car”, not a “bar”. Being an ordinary no frills cat, not one of those intelligent cats you see in cartoons who walk on two legs and watch the news, he does’t realise that cars generally don’t have a big sign outside them saying “car”

Anyway, he goes ahead up to the bar and after a few minutes he sees his mistake. So he decides to adapt to the situation and have a night out in a bar, instead of his planned evening of napping on a car seat.

Not being used to having a choice of beverage (usually he either gets given a bowl of milk or drinks some water from a sewer outlet), he takes a long, long time to decide what drink he wants.

And he enjoys every minute of it. He’s in cat heaven. Eventually he makes up his mind and orders a pint of semi-skimmed. whereupon the bartender advises him that it’s traditional to order a beer or a whiskey or something like that.

The cat points out that he’s not remotely interested in traditions, and that he is, after all, a mere cat, equipped not with a sophisticated set of tastes and a spoilt pallet, but instead just a few insticts inherited from the jungle and polluted by domestication.

The bartender listens politely and points out that the cat has a very good vocabulary for a “mere” cat. The cat politely thanks him, before bidding him good day and going to the dairy.

All of which brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about today. In my formative years, I lived in a rainforest here in Ireland, and never wanted for monkeys or monkey nuts. Monkey bolts were a problem, as it was illegal to remove trees from the rainforest and so we were not able to clear enough space for a steel mine, but we survived, and we’ve all grown up to be reasonably well adjusted individuals, if I say so myself.

Nowadays, as any environmentalist will tell you, the rainforests are disappearing at a tremendous rate. They’re still there of course, but it’s impossible to see them when your glasses have become steamed up from centuries and centuries of rain.

What we need to do is somehow cause a change to the climate so that this rain stops, and then everything will be okay. My suggestion would be that we all stand up for one minute, at exactly the same time, and lift up our right foot, the one with the scabs all over it, so that the fumes given off cause some sort of atmospheric event That will probably sort it out.

If it doesn’t, we’re going to have to get the hell off this planet.

That’s why I’m not wasting any time. I wasn’t going to tell you this but I have, in my back shed, a half finished ark which I intend to use when the bran cereal hits the ventilator. Hopefully it will be finished by then, but that doesn’t really matter because it’s not going to sink is it? I’ll be sailing through outer space, not a vast wet ocean full of water.

It’s much easier to swim in a vacuum than in water. I’ve seen it done on movies. Remember that man in “2001: A Space Odyssey”? The one who floated off into space, never to be seen again, and presumably dead within hours when his oxygen supply runs out? That’s what I plan to do.

I’ve always admired Noah. He knew what he was doing. He saved all the female animals, then made sure each of them had a male of the same species to keep them occupied so that they wouldn’t distract him while he was trying to steer the ark round the tops of the hills.

He also had very good hair. Long and white and flowing, with a matching beard, just like the fellow in the Harry Potter movies. Except of course without the glasses and much older.

It has, throughout my life, been a mystery to me why our short sighted pets are never given glasses when they are diagnosed as being short sighted, or when they are found to be long sighted and find it difficult to read small print. I suspect it’s a conspiracy to prevent other species from evolving and taking over from us humans as the dominant beings. That’s all very well but they forgot about the computers.

We’ve been warned over and over again by Arnold Schwarzenegger that computers are going to take over the world, but we continue to help them by feeding them information through our keyboards. I’m doing it right now, I admit. By typing these paragraphs I am telling my computer how much I know or don’t know or think I know about it’s plan to take over the world, arming it with information. Yet I continue to type. I really am quite a dinghbat.

Maybe I should try typing false information to confuse it. The moon is made out of a special low-carb cheese that is safe to eat in large quantities and definitely won’t jam your circuits, unless you have jam with it too. The current time is quarter to four in the morning. Judge Judy is our leader.

See what you can make of THAT, you electronic power hungry bamtards.