Into Your Head dot IE

The Fallopian Tube of My Mind

1 December 200423 October 2024

Neal’s Belch no. 178 for 1st Dec 2004

I’ve always been strongly against the typed word, in all of it’s hideous and satanic forms.

These ones, for example, are being mass produced by a rather ugly and morally decrepit microprocessor chip inside of your computer, and frankly I think you should be ashamed of yourself. Is there nothing that you won’t stoop to in order to shave another few minutes off your working day?

If you had any respect for me as a writer, you would lift up your telephone receiver, listen to the buzzing of the internet as it comes in through your phone line, decipher my words as you listen to it – it’s only a few million bytes, for christ’s sake – and transcribe it with good old fashioned pen and ink.

I’m also strongly opposed to the use of the word “word” itself. I resent having restrictive labels like that attached to each individual and unique unit within my work. They should each have their own name.

The word “word”, for example, should be called Francis. Obviously each instance of the word within my essays would need to be given a new name. You can’t have several Francises running around the page. That would be very confusing. And frankly, rather stupid. And frankly, William has better things to do with himself than be used as a descriptive pronoun of your stupidity.

As indeed do the two franklys, Patrick and Sheila Frankly.

Just yesterday I was having a fascinating theological debate with a local clergyman, about what happens when you delete a word.

He suggested that it was tantamount to murder. And although I didn’t agree, I could understand his argument. However, I replied that at least I don’t go round spreading my pencil shavings on underage words, and then expect to get away with it after a forced apology and compensation payout twenty five years later.

But I digress. I’m also strongly opposed to the spoken word. I feel that it is enormously lazy and common to flush one’s ill-thought out words out through the neck, just seconds after they’ve been conceived. At least have the decency to allow them an hour or two to feed, in your brain, so that they can prepare for birth.

It’s your responsibility as a parent.

These words, for example, have sat on my computer for a couple of days, still attached to the fallopian tube of my mind, which provides them with important spell checks and partial rewrites that will enable them to lead a healthier and more fulfilled life.

That said, I do acknowledge that it can sometimes seem necessary to communicate with people in that rather vulgar and raw way using your vocal chordsa. When you find yourself in such situations, I recommend covering your mouth with a neckerchief or handkerchief, out of courtesy and consideration for your comunicatee.

It is also advisable to record your speech, so that in the event of a medical emergency your doctor can find out exactly which words you’ve been using, and provide the appropriate antidote. Anyway two cats walk into a bar.

One of them is opposed to the use of spoken words, so he hands the bartender an essay which he prepared earlier that day, requesting a pint of milk.

His final paragraph expresses in advance his gratitude to the server. All goes well and he has a wonderful evening. The other cat, the pompous ass, decides that he is good enough to “speak” his order. And that’s where it all goes horribly wrong.

He stumbles and it all comes out wrong, and the bartender mistakes his request (for a pint of Guinness and some peanuts) for a threat to blow up the entire street. The police are promptly called, and it takes many hours to clear up the misunderstanding.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Bowsy’s Theory of Non Existence

1 December 200419 July 2025

File photo of Bowsy - a brown and white bear seated at a table beside a laptop.

by Bowsy the Bear

As I sit here contemplating the issues that affect all of us (Well, the issues that affect me, anyway. If they happen to coincide with your problems, that’s just good luck on your part that you get to bask in the shining radiance of my wisdom. I’m not trying to help) it occurs to me that many of the bad tidings that are brought to us in this stinking life, are the result not of our own actions or those of others, but of minute changes in the positioning of the stars that were in view the day we were born.

Astrology, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t taken anywhere near seriously enough. I’m convinced that if we sent Bruce Willis up on a self-sacrificing mission to destroy the asteroid that’s currently obscuring the Capricorn nebula under whose sky I was born, my life would instantly be the better for it.

Ditto Michael Keaton. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people with weird permanently inquisitive eyebrows. Admittedly my face is entirely covered in hair and in theory if you shaved the right bits of it away, you would be left with a weird eyebrow. However, that’s not going to happen, and if any asshole tries to shave me they’ll soon find out about the full moon and why it shines bright red after I kick the crap out of it.

As I was saying to Rush Limbaugh the other day, there is not enough corporal punishment in this world. If someone’s ass needs kicking you are doing them a service by kicking it, and possibly preventing them from falling into a spiral of crime and deviation into which they would otherwise tumble.

I myself was thrown around the room by both Neal and his father as they shouted “Flying lessons, Bowsy” when I was younger, and I’m all the better for it. In fact, I believe another few trips and I would now be able to fly. Those bastards stopped as soon as they realised I was learning a new skill that could release me from my domestic slavery and allow me to see the world.

Of course, nowadays I have the advantage of being old, which means it is expected of me that I am grumpy and cranky. This is a wonderful development, and I use it to my great advantage.

Just yesterday I gave out stink to a milkman for false advertising. His sign claimed that the milk was 98% fat free, and I pointed none of the milk was fat free. I maintained that every single drop of the milk, all one hundred percent of it, contained 2% fat.

You can’t let these people walk all over you. If you do, your stuffing gets squeezed down to your legs and you end up having your chest opened and an old windscreen cloth and half of Neal’s pyjamas get inserted permanently into your chestal cavity.

Then you get roped in to write crap for some damn website that he’s got, and have to listen to the likes of Elfy insulting you in the guestbook. Oh dear, I seem to have strayed from the topic. Wonder where I picked that habit up from.

Anyway, there’s a little known system of belief followed by some people, that they are the only person in the Universe and everyone else is just a figment of their imagination, put there for their entertainment and stimulation. Apparently this has been the reason given for the actions of some or the great serial killers. Or at least by the fictional one-time alleged murderer featured on British television police soap “The Bill” last night, but I’ve used poetic license and trajectory and decided it happens all the time. Sue me. Anyhoo, my own belief is the complete opposite, as I will explain.

I am convinced that everybody in the whole universe is real, except me.

My theory is that I am a figment of your imagination, created for your entertainment and / or stimulation. The evidence backs it up:

How many bears do you know who can write a five hundred word article in two sittings of fifteen minutes each? Very few I suggest. In reality, most bears are barely able to string a sentence together without making a fatal grammatical error and becoming misunderstood.

The upshot of all this is that if I am a figment of your imagination, it follows that everything I say has come from your mind, not mine.

In other words, all of the opinions expressed on this page are yours. Every single one of them

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Bowsy’s Christ you Humans are Dumb II

1 December 200419 July 2025

by Bowsy the Bear

Well replace my stuffing with cat’s vomit if it isn’t almost Summer again.

For those who don’t know, that’s the season when every goddam asshole apparantly feels an irrisistible urge to strip half naked and expose their armits and hairy backs for all the world to see. This despite years of warnings from the medical world that if you sit under the sun all day you’re going to die a long, slow painful death and not only that, you’ll be hideously ugly too.

You humans really aren’t the brightest crayons in the packet, are you. You’ll notice I haven’t added a question mark there.

Anyhoo, yesterday there I was watching Columbo, when during the commericials one of those road safety adverts popped up. You know them – the ones that feature a driver and passengers getting ripped to pieces by their own windscreen because the gobshite in the front hasn’t been paying attention, or some such thing. Apparently you losers can’t just be told “don’t speed, it’s a bit dangerous”.

Oh no.

You don’t believe anything until the government hires a shitload of actors and a director to play out the scenario for you. You even expect them to wreck a real car in the process. Then you might start to listen.

Maybe. If you’re not too busy pouring gallons of pure alcohol down your greedy gullet in an attempt to make your friends look more interesting.

That’s why anti smoking campaigns don’t work. You’re just not going to listen until they wheel out John Wayne’s ghost and he rips out his lungs for you to have a good close up look at. Then you might consider cutting back.

They try making it easy for you. They even paint a couple of thick white lines across the road for you to cross between, and another line for the cars to wait behind until the big luminious set of lights changes to green. In Ireland they add in a ramp at each side of the road and cover it in a tactile surface so even people who can’t see can find where the designated safe crossing area is.

Meanwhile, you’re thirty yards down the street, staggering across the road in an untidy diagonal, passing right in front of a forty foot truck as you make an ultra important call on your telephone, which you make sure to press hard against your head while we await conclusive proof of their safety, maybe reading the latest Stephen King about a family who’s being haunted by the revengeful pedestrian who they ran over and killed.

We do these things a little differently in the bear world.

Allow me to explain, using an easy to understand example. Put your hand up if you’ve got any questions, and I’ll bite it off for you.

Let’s say. I’m in the woods. In actual fact I’m not. I’m flung on the floor of the spare room while that asshole downstairs writes this crap in my name. Anyway, say I’m in the woods and my friend Ullysses, that cheap bastard who Neal got in a supermarket with a few tokens and an old Irish five pound note, is walking ahead of me.

And all of a sudden I hear a high pitched “yelp”, followed by a scream, in that unmistakeably stupid voice that I know to belong to Ullysses. What do I do? Well of course I carry on the same route that Ully took and hope for the best.

Well I do if I’m a human

But being a member of a more thought-driven species, I slow down and assess the situation, and carefully check whether my companion has come to any danger, and if it turns out that he’s been shot to pieces by a drug-crazed deer hunter who’s had a bad day, then I consider the possiblity of maybe giving some thought to whether or not it might be advisable to take a different route.

It’s that simple, humanity. If a tenth of your population is dying of lung cancer, think about not smoking so much. If there’s a load of people getting killed by speeding on the roads every weekend, consider slowing down. And if your entire family have died a long, slow painful death as a result of sitting in the sun all day, I’d perhaps think about maybe putting on a shirt on the beach when it’ reaches, say, a hundred degress celcius. Just for the sake of reducing your theoretical odds, or whatever.

Personally, I think the Road Runner said it best when he said “meep meep”, then flew off down the mountain road at breakneck speed to avoid having his neck broken by a bloodthirsty coyote. Not that that’s going to happen to any of you, but if you’ve got even half an imagination you’ll adapt the tale to fit into your daily lives.

Say for example that the coyote is a Nissan Micra and the Road Runner is…I dunno…you, and the mountain road is a pavement outside your house that’s very slippy because you have failed to live up to your legal responsibility to keep it free of ice.

Now let’s say the Nissan Micra notices that you’ve got an Acme brand bowling ball shaped bomb hidden under your fur, so it slows to five miles an hour to delay it’s approach so that, by the time the Nissan reaches you, you’ve been blown to smithereens.

Now lets say there’s no moral to that story, and that I just made it up because I enjoy the thought of you being blown up.

And let’s say you’re reading this sentence, gripped by every word that passes into your ears and astounded at the profundity, truth and wisdom that eminates from it’s author, and wondering what the bear is going to come out with next. Now let’s say you’re an asshole.

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Breaking the law is Already Illegal

1 December 200423 October 2024

A Neal’s Belch from 2004

Yesterday I was on my way out of a train station when I noticed something that I had never noticed before. Without exception, every single one of the turnstiles at the exits was set to turn in a clockwise direction.

So I did some research and it turns out that all turnstiles and revolving doors in the northern hemisphere turn that way, while everything south of the equator goes counter-clockwise. Apparently the same is true of the way liquids swirl clockwise or anti-clockwise when you pour them down the sink. For some reason that I can’t quite fathom, the hands on clocks move clockwise no matter what part of the world you are in.

But this got me thinking. What would happen if I started messing with the laws of gravity or magnetism or whatever you call it? Would I get in trouble with the law? Where I come from, if you want to pass a law you must first put yourself up for election to the national parliament, then convince a majority of your colleagues to vote for your proposed piece of legislation. But apparently if you’re Isaac Newton or somebody, you can pass a law just by saying stuff that nobody else understands.

As an aside here, I would just like to pay tribute to all of the scientists throughout the ages who have experimented with apples. I myself once ate an apple right through to the core, and on seeing the hard white flesh near the centre, and thinking about it in silence for a few long minutes, came up with an idea for an essay about turnips for my website. So I can easily see how an apple could provide inspiration for such masterpieces as Newton’s Gravity Yoke, or whatever he came up with.

Really if we’re being fair, we should give credit to the apples, not the scientist. But this is a topsy-turvy world and for some reason it’s always the human, not the inanimate organic food, that gets thanked.

Anyway, back to the laws of science. Now I, as a private citizen, am not empowered to pass a law, for example, that bans television stations from killing selected viewers who change stations during the commercials. However, apparently I am completely free to legislate that “What goes up, must spin three times, freeze for a second like a tense moment in a cartoon, then come down”, and call it “Neal’s Law of Going up and Spinning”, Because that’s science. So I’ve decided that I’m going to take advantage of this new-found power by passing some new scientific laws.

I hereby order that cats cannot land on their feet unless they are covered in orange marmalade and humming the theme tune from Frasier.

That’s enough for now. I don’t want to abuse my privileges.

In fact, in the above short paragraph I’ve achieved pretty much everything I set out to achieve when I decided to go into politics, so I’m going to retire now. I think I can achieve more by quietly campaigning and maybe making a few Euros on the lecture circuit to support myself.

When I was a twelve year old I wanted to change the world. I thought I would become Prime Minister of some country or other, and I would outlaw all crime and remove poverty forever. Then I came to realise that all crime is already outlawed, so I decided to concentrate on a cure for poverty. The solution I came up with was to give everybody a large quantity of money and order them not to spend it. Then nobody would ever be poor ever again and we would all live happily ever after. Just like in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Although Goldilocks, of course, would never have dreamed of putting orange marmalade on her cat’s paws. And this refusal to conform with the norms or our society would mean she is now guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal under my new “Orange Marmalade Humming Act, 2004”, referred to earlier.

But you shouldn’t take from this that I am a staunch conservative who wants to hang all criminals and then put them in jail after they’re dead.

No.

All I’m saying is that it’s fun to make laws that annoy people, especially those who have cats or who refuse to keep a minimum level of marmalade in stock.

You know, these are the same people who you see at polling booths, scratching their heads and trying to make a last minute decision about who to vote for. My country now has colour photos on the ballot sheet, so you can pick which candidate has the best hair, and vote for him or her without having to find out who they are or what they stand for.

So it’s not all bad.

And I never said it was. I’m not a glass-half-empty person. It’s not empty until I shove the flat, day-old coke from last night down my parched throat at seven o’clock the next morning because I don’t have time to make coffee.

Then it’s empty. And that brings me nicely back to the hemispheres / clockwise / anticlockwise thing. Because there’s going to be nothing left in the glass to throw down the sink and test which way it swirls as it disappears down the drain.

So now we’ll never know.

Bowsy’s An (Axl) Rose by any Other Name

26 November 200419 July 2025

by Bowsy the Bear

From 2006, Bowsy chimes in on the contraversial Matchstick Cats G’N’R New Tracks Specials, found here.

So here’s how it went down.

As far as I can ascertain using my limited investigative powers as an inanimate bear, somebody posted in a couple of GNR forums on the Internet on Saturday, declaring that this site would shortly be presenting the two “Matchstick Cats GNR brand new tracks specials”.

Unfortunately due to an oversight the chosen sites turned out not to be websites devoted to enthusiasts of the Great Northern Railways, but in fact were fan sites of the rock band “Guns’n’Roses”.

By late afternoon the announcement was quoted in dedicated sections of at least two major websites that devote themselves to proving or debunking rumours. The rumour spread like wildfire through that wonderful network of humans known as the World Wide Web. Soon the world’s rock fans were converging in their 1200s on this humble corner of the Internet, the more vocal among them making their disappointment felt very articulately, although unfortunately not always in English, in the guestbook

Apparently, the expected normal release process for new music nowadays is through tiny cat comic websites run off a laptop in Ireland. My god, the music industry has changed. In my day, you had to buy a bulky scratchy old gramophone record, which you ordered by telegram from Amazon.com, then collected from their store a couple of weeks later.

Not that I have much interest in this hard rock stuff, you understand. Personally, I much prefer to relax with a copy of Hayden’s trumpet concerto in D minor. But you have to give the young kids what they want. And I have to admit, I do have a soft spot for W’axl Rose, ever since he stood on stage with his colleague Elton John and gave a beautiful rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, with a tear in his eye and a heavy heart at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert.

Little wonder that such a mind could also give us the operatic emotion of the wedding death scene in the November Rain video. It is a work of such devastating profundity that I invariably piss my fur while viewing it.

The audience is left in tears as the best man, played (ironically, given the urinatical effect) by “Slash”, unable to participate in the ceremony because of height restrictions and not realising that he could just take off his top hat, is left outside the chapel with nothing to entertain himself but his trusty old guitar.

Sadly, it has been some time since G’N’F’N’R have released any new material, and many of the original members have dispersed to occupy themselves elsewhere.

Hence the need for websites like this to fill the void with our Matchstick Cats Brand New Tracks Specials. Think of us as a sort of cover band, without any members, musicianship skills, or intention of releasing anything in the immediate fut-

-Never mind.

Anyhoo, the upshot of it all is that it is almost as if this whole thing is an illusion of some kind. And if there’s one thing that our heroes have taught us, it is that you must “Use your illusion” to the full extent of it’s capabilities.

Personally my favourite involves pulling a top hat out of a rabbit’s ass, then stuffing it back in again. Everybody knows of course that it’s not a real hat. But who’s going to tell the rabbit that? And is it going to care? Rabbits are not the type who turn down the possibility of having something stuffed up them, and who can blame them. They live a horrible life, cooped up in their little rabbit ghettos with the several hundred children running around and causing all sorts of rumpus.

You’d think that an animal that is born equipped with no less than four rabbit’s feet, would have a lot more luck than that.

More Bowsy

90 R and 91 R: The G’N’R Brand New Tracks Specials (Reduxed)

25 November 200412 February 2026

From 2004, these are recovered early episodes of Matchstick Cats which, like the podcast, has evolved over two decades and hundreds of instalments. I like to think of the first few hundred as pilots.

For my accessibility I’ve “reduxed” the very earliest episodes by converting to dark backgrounds and tidying up text in places.

For more on this contraversial moment in Matchstick Cats’s history, read Bowsy the Bear’s thinkpiece: An (Axl) Rose by Any Other Name – part of the Bowsy the Bear Collection.