Some emergency facts for when you cannot access Wikipedia, which we’re pretending was a real concern at time of writing, 2012.

• It would be highly unusual, in their natural habitat and especially at night, for cats to arrange their eyes in straight lines along the centre of a road.
  
  
• Based on the complete absence of any archaeological remains, historians believe igloos were only invented three months ago.
  
  
• If you turn a transparent glass clock upside down and back to front, then make it run counter clockwise, it is rendered useless.
  
  
• A human colon, laid out in a field, could distribute fertiliser and water to an acre of crops. Hence the term “colonic irrigation”.
  
• Contrary to popular misunderstanding, chicken coups are rare, and poultry farmers almost always manage to overpower the instigator.
  
  
• In theory, if you built a large enough floodlight to illuminate the dark side of the moon, it could no longer accurately be called that.
  
  
• Archaeologists studying prehistoric cave drawings have observed that the symbols used for “elbow” and “arse” are practically identical.
  
  
• The phrase “letting off steam” refers to the tendency of medical researchers to concentrate on the dangers of smoke inhalation, while (unfairly, some would argue) ignoring the dangers of steam.
  
  
• Unlike their human counterparts, glove puppets and sock puppets are pretty much interchangeable.
  
  

In the nineteen seventies the first carrier pigeons took off from my home town and made their way across the Irish sea to England.

They were carrying a shipment of carrier pigeons to a would-be pigeon breeder, who wanted to stop being a would-be pigeon breeder and a be a real pigeon breeder instead, so he’d decided to go ahead and breed pigeons.

He didn’t do the actual breeding himself. He hired a male carrier pigeon to do that for him. In those days it was considered inappropriate for the a human to mate with a carrier pigeon. The seventies were a time of great conservatism and restriction of freedoms in my country. Although I’ve just realised that doesn’t make sense because this would-be pigeon breeder guy is supposed to be in England. Dammit.

Okay let’s pretend that my home town, wherefrom the pigeons took off, is in Northern Ireland not the Republic, and that’s (officially, technically, and don’t shoot the messenger (literally or figuratievely)) in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as is England, so that works I think

It was not until the mid nineteen eighties that it became legal to be adopted by h a carrier pigeon here in Irel-I mean Northern Ireland, and even then it was generally accepted that you were only allowed to be pen pals, and no more. As a child I was once paired, by my school, with with a pen-pal from Pensyllvania in America.  I think people in Pensyllvania feel obliged to write to somebody because the name of their state derives from the word “pencil,” and also because they go to a school that has some sort of arrangment with a school in Irland.

Anyway I’m not going to tell you any more about that, in case my rambling is making you angry and red faced, and you end up being mistaken for a nicely ripened tomatoe by an over enthusiastic sandwich maker who proceeds to chop you up and sprinkle you with a selection of green herbs and spices which tickle your nose and make you want to sneeze and sneeze and sneeze all day every day for the rest of your life or at least until Family Guy comes on and you’ve satisfied yourself that it’s not a rerun, or at least that you haven’t seen that episode before.

Don’t forget that now that you are a tomatoe, you will have a much lower life expectancy that you did as a human. Tomatoes rarely live past their sixth month. They become victim to crimes of passion or else they get made into a pizza. I can never remember which.

I was talking to a cucumber enthusiast the other day and he pointed out to me, in a very convincing and rather frightening tone, that cucumbers are significantly more resiliant than tomatoes, and even they don’t live very long. 

And I had to agree. I bought a cucumber recently that was wrapped in tough cellophane and already it’s gone soft and wrinkly and I’m not completely sure that I want to eat it anymore.

Admitedly it’s past it’s sell-by date and I have to admit that I have not yet sold it. The market is slow these days and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find someone who is currently living in a slightly smaller one and wants to move up the property ladder.

People who are cucumber enthusiasts generally find it hard to get mortgages, I’ve always found. This is because the banks realise that these people care so much about cucumbers that they will never eat them, and that therefore they are not eating enough vegetables and are likely to run into ill health before the end of their mortgage term.

The anti-cucumber lobby, on the other hand, receive more loan approvals than they can handle Mark my words, a couple of decades from now there’s going to be a lot of green juice on the faces of these bank managers when they discover that their customers can’t pay back the money they borrowed for their houses or cucumbers or whatever I’m supposed to be talking about.

I’m sorry but I haven’t had any porridge this morning and am finding it hard to follow my train of thought to it’s logical conclusion. The train has apparently buckled and somehow ended up on that other piece of unused track that you let your dog pee on when you go for a walk because you assume that it’s too old to be electrified.

Don’t worry, your dog will be fine.

Dogs like electricity. They lap it up the same way that a cat laps up milk. Strangely enough, electric power is surprising low in both energy and vitamins. Your dog is pretty much eating empty calories. Why don’t you just buy some canned stuff like everybody else?

A blog post from 2011, “enhanced” in 2012

Well, that time of year has passed again, and here we are, all stuffed full of turkey and poitín, wondering what to do with the leftovers. 

 I have a system to which I have stuck rigidly throughout the years. If the turkey was good and tasty, and all of the guests enjoyed it, I reward it the day after Christmas Day by letting it live, and setting it free to roam the world and seek it’s fortune, walking off down the road with all of its earthly possessions wrapped in a bag on the end of a stick, just like Puss in Boots.

IIncidentally, this is the only paragraph in this article that was not written years in advance of the current movie Puss in Boots, which my wife and I saw yesterday. I think the me of the early 2000s may have been a clairvoyant or something.

QUICK RECIPE: For the perfect hot chicken sandwich: Season with salt, bring to the boil, simmer for three to five minutes, then remove shell and serve on toast.

If, however, the bird was unpalatable, I beat it to within an inch of it’s life, and force it to apologise for embarrassing me in front of my hungry friends and loved ones, after I very kindly gave it a warm home for Christmas. Then I drive it back to the ghettos from whence it came, and kick it out of the car, just like Danny DeVito in “Changing Places”.

I tell it to warn it’s friends never to cross my path, unless they happen to be black cats. I also send it a bill for the sauce that we had to use to disguise it’s taste. You cannot let these birds walk all over you. Otherwise they w-

-I’ve just noticed that the spell checker is suggesting that I not apostrophise the word “it’s”. Well, I must say, that has put me in foul humour. No, not “humor”, you electronic asshole. I live in Europe , where we use proper English. No offence.

Although of course I’m in Ireland , agus ba fhearr liom scriobh as Gailge, mar sin. But I’m willing to concede to those of you who have failed to become proficient in my country’s beautiful ancestral tongue. Anyway, two cats walk into a sandwich bar.

One of them asks the young woman behind the counter for a tongue sandwich, and promptly gets kicked out of the store The other, seeing his chance, asks her out to the cinema. The following day, Neil Armstrong lands on the moon and utters the immortal phrase “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask whether you really want to live in a country so small that right now I can hold it between my forefinger and thumb. Although admittedly I am on the moon, looking at the earth from a great distance, and suffering the hallucinogenic effects of eating lunar cheese in massive quantities. Cheap bastards didn’t pack me a lunchbox. Are we recording yet? These audio-cassette things will never take off. Christ I wish I could have a proper, non-vacuumed shit right now”.

QUICK RECIPE: To prepare tortoise eggs: Salt lightly, place in boiling water, simmer for five minutes, then remove shell and cut open to find perfectly cooked eggs.

And in a way, I suppose that sums up what this season has meant to those of us who start a sentence without having any idea how it’s going to end. And since the next sentence is no longer relevant, it’s been deleted and the rest of this is pretty much filler, and the next bit will seem out of place and irrelevant. Not least because I am drunk to the very bottom or my soul with that rich and wonderful thing that has been brought to me these past few months. Carlsberg. Ten cans for €10 at my local Centra, most bank holiday weekends.

A useful tip for poaching eggs: Placing some balls of white paper in the nest buys you some time to escape unnoticed.

I’ve always liked seeming out of place. Frequently I walk up to drive-through restaurants, just for the sheer hell of it. I usually order the unhealthiest item on the menu, and ironically “power walk” my way home while eating a double cheese thing and cramming French-fried potatoes down my greedy throat.

Okay I’m done.