Into Your Head dot IE - podcast and Matchstick Cats comics. Stream of consciousness humour by Neal O'Carroll

VINTAGE IYH – 064: Duran Something

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:57 — 12.1MB)

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Please beware: These are very early vintage shows from a podcast that evolved gradually over 18+ years and 800+ episodes and sounds very different today. If you’re new to Into Your Head, please try my later shows first.

This is the second of two episodes that came out on the same date. It’s not an error. Tonight’s topics include:
Between two consecutive days, Stupid place for a mountain, A fuel thief in the audience, Podcaster diplomacy issues, Black market petrol, A less gloomy cat song, The first pluck is the hardest, Pronunciation of “Duran” and “Duran” respectively, Two “Delilah”s under the microscope, No disrespect to Freddie Mercury, Wales’ secret cat song exporter, Not afraid to curtail things, Undressing the sky, Dealing with flem, Paws and pause in other languages, How to wreck a legal conference.

Also: Joanne with a special selection of folkloric cat stories.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International – Attribution: Neal O’Carroll via IntoYourHead.ie – Many episodes findable forever on Archive dot org.

VINTAGE IYH – 061: Magnetic Murders

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:14 — 17.1MB)

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Please beware: These are very early vintage shows from a podcast that evolved gradually over 18+ years and 800+ episodes and sounds very different today. If you’re new to Into Your Head, please try my later shows first.

Tonight’s topics include:
Calculating the average listener, Exceling in music and hair, Acapello humming from my past, Fake folk music, The man who ate apples while moving, Cats and mice as a story-embellishment, Why virtual pets must be mortal, Charlie the lucky idiot, Cloud cuckoo land, Imaginary people, Avoiding axe murderers by text, Threatening a paperclip, Puddles of pee,Delusions about magnetic murder and Terminators, {Vintage material: Let’s blow into something, Our local crocadile hunter, Digestive biscuits, Inter-species nutrition, Inter-species marriage, Related by cat marriage, New rules for bank officials, Living with a fourth dimension, A makeshift holodeck, The new voiceover guy, Naming things after Karl Marx, The Definite Article}, Interupting my vintage self, Conlcusion of the paperclip incident, My President Bush lifestyle.
Music: “Twinkle Twinkle My Guitar” by Dilbrent. Use restricted under the following Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Generic which can be viewed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ All other music composed in-house. Additional voiceovery stuff thanks Lockjaw and Dustin (TipYourHat.com).

Overall episode – License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International – Attribution: Neal O’Carroll via IntoYourHead.ie – Many episodes findable forever on Archive dot org.

VINTAGE IYH – 060: Songetic LIcense

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:29:59 — 36.3MB)

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Please beware: These are very early vintage shows from a podcast that evolved gradually over 18+ years and 800+ episodes and sounds very different today. If you’re new to Into Your Head, please try my later shows first.current episodes first.

Tonight’s topics include:
Where “here” is, Measuring a country, Verifying listener credentials, Counterfeit podcasts, Submitting to scientific journals, Fun with dry ice and acid, Pointless fire-prevention research, Marking my words, Novelising this show, Tuning in to this show, Identifying with Bruce Springsteen, Investing in cat songs, Rock star cat deceptions, Peeing into a guitar, People hate urine, Exporting sewage to Australia, My new idea to save the planet with frozen urine, Faking a mouse click, Listener input system song, Songetic license, Ending gently.


Also: Some listener e-mail, A song about Bruce Springsteen’s cat, and Sháinne Greoige with a special investigative editorial about beastalks and your children.
Additional voicey stuff thanks: Lockjaw and Dustin.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International – Attribution: Neal O’Carroll via IntoYourHead.ie – Many episodes findable forever on Archive dot org.

VINTAGE IYH – 037: Quantity over Quality III

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:00:02 — 48.1MB)

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Please beware: These are very early vintage shows from a podcast that evolved gradually over 18+ years and 800+ episodes and sounds very different today. If you’re new to Into Your Head, please try my later shows first.

A super-length special to celebrate the creation of our longest show ever.Tonight’s topics include: Act 1: Legitimately introducing oneself, Ways to analyse a fridge, Fulfilling your noise requirements, Unappreciated containers, A margarine feast, Preventing your dinner from freezing, Parmesan cheese as an egg substitute, Apple juice for your PC, Some egg sizing issues, A mayonaisse lottery, Buying listener merchandise, Surplus Stirring, Torturing yourself, Understanding real time and that’s just Act 1.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International – Attribution: Neal O’Carrol – Many episodes findable forever on Archive dot org.

VINTAGE IYH – 036: Alphabetic Bladder Therapy

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:30 — 23.1MB)

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Please beware: These are very early vintage shows from a podcast that evolved gradually over 18+ years and 800+ episodes and sounds very different today. If you’re new to Into Your Head, please try my later shows first.current episodes first.

Definitely not dandruff, Speaking less legibly, Decoffination, Interference if we’re lucky, Too late to avoid learning, Unintentionally saying “cat”, An entertaining microwave, TV events in the 1800s, Pretending to talk about psychiatry, Alphabetic bladder therapy, Personal issues with “X” and “Q”, A single entry phone book, Getting away from counting, Gravity not enough, Countdown to an ordinary midnight – an experiment, Making milk exciting, Ironing my thoughts, Bill Clinton’s handwriting, Functioning eyelids, Calculating the sun’s age, Illogical sizing of clock faces, Reconstructing the last word and more.

Also: In a new feature, Joanne tackles some listener mail., starting with a question about something, and delivers another lecture from the Into Your Head Adult Learning Programme.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International – Attribution: Neal O’Carroll via IntoYourHead.ie – Many episodes findable forever on Archive dot org.

Self Perpetuating Moth

It’s that time of year again, when cigarette manufacturers cynically launch their iced cigarettes on a sweltering public.

At the other end of the spectrum, the tree huggers remind us that this is the season when we should be saving as much sunlight as possible to power our homes and cars, rather than selfishly tanning ourselves in our back gardens. Meanwhile, Pope Benedict has completed his review of the state of Limbo dancing, and mysteriously concluded that it should not be abolished.

I cannot accept that the above are not all connected in some way. For one thing they’re together in a single paragraph (or were, until a 2024 revision). If there’s one thing the education system has taught me, it’s that a paragraph is a self-contained discussion of a sub-topic within an essay. If there’s two things it’s taught me, they are: (1) That a paragraph is a self-contained discussion of a sub-topic within an essay, and (2) something else. It’s similar to the way in which the domestic cat is a sub-group within the extended cat family. If I came across my cat Hairy mingling with a sabre-toothed tiger at Dublin Zoo, I would immediately think that one or other of them were out of place.

That’s not to say that the modern day Zoologist is particularly challenged when trying to differentiate between those particular cousins. The domesticated cat is very rarely seen in these places, except in countries where there are no domesticated cats in the wild, and people come to the zoo hoping to see one for the very first time. In these countries of course, a house cat is “speed-evolved” from the indigenous tigers or lions, so that locals can see what a genuine native housecat would be like, were it to actually exist in the wild locally.

The speed evolving process is fascinating, I’m sure, but I know nothing about it. I’m quite sure though that if you go to Wikipedia you’ll be able to find information about it. If you can’t, don’t be shy about going making something up yourself. That’s how Wikipedia works, after all. Be sure to quote this article as a source though. They’re very fussy about citing sources over there. I’ll go ahead and name Wikipedia as the source for this article, just for tidiness.*

The book of the cult British television sit-com “Red Dwarf” asserts that a cat, if left alone in the basement of a spacecraft for a million years, will evolve into a very selfish and self-obsessed humanoid creature who likes tuna. Obviously this is an appalling stereotype, and I made up the bit about the tuna. However, I did this for a reason. I cannot, under current copyright laws, simply recount a story that someone else has already told elsewhere, no more that I can legally perform an exact copy of the Bob Dylan song “Buckets of Rain”, by growing a clone of his voice box and having it transplanted into my body, and instructing my band to learn to perfectly duplicate every note of the performance. That would be stealing.

However, I am perfectly entitled to perform a “skit” of an original piece of work, by adding a bit about tuna to make it obvious that my version is a ridiculous spoof. And that’s what I’ve done here. The beauty of the whole scheme is that my “tuna” bit appears to fit naturally into the story, and only the most widely-read among you will have spotted that it was my own addition.

Of course, the whole cats-liking-tuna thing is a popular but unfounded myth, the beginnings of which lie in the similarities between dolphins and cats, of which there are very few. In a nutshell, they both have whiskers. It certainly is funny that such an untruth could spread so widely through the cat owning population. Luckily, cats have over time grown to like the fish, and it has turned into one of those self-perpetuating myths.

Incidentally, I’ve always wanted to start a myth about moths. The opportunities for alliteration would be almost endless. Sadly though, spreading a rumour through the population is not as simple as that. Take for example the fact that Michael J. Fox caught his unfortunate illness from spending too much time in a rocking chair in his youth. Clearly nobody would believe this, because young people are supposedly “known” to be averse to rocking chairs. But has this ever been proven? Has there ever been an article in “Scientific American” setting out the results of a study of the recreational sitting habits of our young children?

Frankly, I don’t know.

An Into Your Head podcast blog post From 2007

VINTAGE IYH – 023: Chinese Ice Cream

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:04 — 15.5MB)

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Please beware: These are very early vintage shows from a podcast that evolved gradually over 18+ years and 800+ episodes and sounds very different today. If you’re new to Into Your Head, please try my later shows first.

.TONIGHT’S TOPICS INCLUDE: Say something worth saying, Sorry about the crucification thing, Vegan dairy products, Free range humans, Finding my weight in gold, Jesus mows the lawn, Fishmongers are nice, The scales on the fish on the scales, Optional extras for horse purchasers, The inappropriate scales of injustice, Misunderstood Satanism in schools, Helpless in the face of house theft, The big roofing fraud, Man’s best friend (supposedly), A bittersweet trip to the toilet, Unfulfilled ice cream dreams, Dead cats in China, My futurecrime.Sháinne Greoige is on holiday but we have the latest update on the cat litter controversy from Athy Weekly World News, and Neal gives a unique guest-lecture for the Into Your Head Adult Learning Programme. All theme music / bumpers composed on our Madplayer (an ancient and defunct device that creates bespoke music on the fly).

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International – Attribution: Neal O’Carroll via IntoYourHead.ie – Many episodes findable forever on Archive dot org.

VINTAGE IYH – 015: Madonna and Child

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:48 — 15.2MB)

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Please beware: These are very early vintage shows from a podcast that evolved gradually over 18+ years and 800+ episodes and sounds very different today. If you’re new to Into Your Head, please try my later shows first.

TONIGHT’S TOPICS INCLUDE:Cardboard coincidences, My part in the Christmas industry, Economists drawing cats, Selling microscopic pets, Governing from a leather recepticle, Building a better future with the colour beige, Other people’s nuclear bombs, Scrambled eggs before Haloween, Ex-beings, Feet don’t grow overnight, The Madonna and foster-child, Mother Teresa’s skimpy attire, Martin Scorcesse’s blue crayons, Feed me feedback, A sense of the ridiculousALSO TONIGHT The first ever Tomo’ at Large, with our new Crime Correspondent, Athy Weekly World News with Sháinne Greoige , and another lecture from the Into Your Head Adult Learning Programme: Intermediate Psychology for Beginners, Joanne’s Weekly Cat Song 2. All music made on our “Madplayer”, a defunct and wonderful device that generates music on the fly.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International – Attribution: Neal O’Carroll via IntoYourHead.ie – Many episodes findable forever on Archive dot org.