Neal’s Belch 189 from Jan 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that brings me to my point.

An early 2005 “MatchstickCats.com Editorial”

Picture this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But at least now you know.

From 13th Jan, 2005 – Editorial

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

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

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

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

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

Eggs are a breakfast item.

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

But I won’t.

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

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

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

Published as Neal’s Belch or Neal’s Issues circa 2005

3x/4 ^72+ (3y-7) = 4. Although of course that’s just my personal opinion. I’ve always, from an early age, held strong convictions on certain elements of mathematics. In my first year of school I held the class up for half a day while I explained to the teacher why I felt that two plus two is equal to five. I patiently brought her through my arguments about encouraging positivity and aiming higher than the rather easy and defeatist objective of “four”. I simply felt that she was not pushing us enough, and I was not prepared to stand idly by while my future was sold to the gods of complacency and underachievement.

Nowadays of course we’ve all realised that there is no need to educate our children. I certainly won’t be sending my children to any sort of a school. The risks of catching nits are far too high. My local private school breeds them in the chemistry lab and throws them at cats to scare them and make them think they’ve got fleas. It’s all in the interests of science, of course. They are carrying out admirable research into whether a nit can be used as some sort of a flea placebo. The theory is that animals can be tricked into thinking they have fleas, and that therefore they will scratch themselves a lot more, and the static electricity produced can be harnessed and used to power inflatable emergency rafts and toasters.

I myself have two emergency toasters, and of course I make sure that they are never both in the same building at any one time. I don’t like to take risks with anything. I’ve been stung too many times. Just yesterday a wasp leapt out at me from behind a window ledge and attacked me in broad daylight, apparently for no other purpose than to exert mindless violence on an innocent member of the public.

Which itself is rather stupid, because I am not a member of the “public”, and to the best of my knowledge never have been. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to join such a stupid and pointless organisation, other than to mock and ridicule the other members secretly from the inside, without their knowing. Just like I used to do in the Beavers.

I must say though, I think people are rather lazy in their negativity about getting stung. It’s not always bad. Spiderman got stung, and ended up being able to jump over things in space, and star in movies. I’d love to be able to do that. And I live in hope, although so far the only thing that has happened to me as a result of an insect bite is that I’ve developed three extra personalities.

That reminds me, I’m starting to think that one of my personalities, Brian, is a schizophrenic. He seems to spend an awful lot of time apparently talking to himself in two alternating voices. One of my other personalities, Zebadee, is a psychiatry student, and he disagrees strongly with me. He argues that that fact that I am conscious of Philip talking to himself, means that I must be psychic, and that what I’m actually hearing are Brian’s memories of a conversation that he heard earlier, between myself and Zebadee.

I’m inclined to agree with Zebedee. Not least because he has spent several years in University studying all this stuff. I must say, that was a wasted time of my life. I deeply regret that I didn’t pay attention during the lectures that Zebedee attended. I wouldn’t even have had to pay any fees for the course, since of course we shared a body. That aside, I’ll tell you one thing. Sharing a personage with another personality is not a pastime for the claustrophobic.

I never had any privacy in those days, except at night when we would hang a blackout curtain between our inner ears. It didn’t work of course, but we would convince ourselves that we couldn’t hear each other’s thoughts when the curtain was up.

It was the only way we had of keeping sane.