From November 2004, the first extra edition of Neal’s Belch for IllitPress.com. Run by RazZ and JMW from Niagara Falls, Canada, Illiterate Press was a bit like my MatchstickCats.com of that era but with hipper writers and more swearing. I did my best to fit in.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing but respect for those fine people who work in the cat food industry. Absolutely nothing at all. It’s just that there’s something hypocritical about people who purport to be doing everything within their powers to advance the health and status of cats, yet at the same time they’re killing innocent little fishes, including presumably catfish, and chopping them up to be put into cans. As far as I’m concerned (note to self: must insert gratuitous vulgarity – remember you’re at IllitPress now), this is all a crock of shit.

Several years ago, I, for a short time, worked in one of those factories, just like the one where they make the cat food.

Admittedly we were assembling and packing Christmas Trees, which did not come anywhere near the animal food chain until about ten years after their manufacture, when they finally reached the landfill next door to the cat food company. But that’s not the point.

If you think that that is the point, then you are sadly mistaken. You have allowed yourself to become distracted and perfussed, and you should be ashamed of yourself for losing control of your faculties in such a way. In doing so, you have lost much of the respect and benefit-of-the-doubt which I had previously allocated towards you in my mind. You fucking idiot. (Hey this is easier than I thought.)

I myself never would allow myself to be thrown off topic. Anyway, two cats walk into a sandwich bar.

One of the cats notices the presence of a Catfish sandwich on the menu, and immediately walks out in disgust. He rather kindly spares the other cat the knowledge of it’s presence.

Which is fortunate because the other cat is rather sensitive, and would probably have quite a shock, were he to see something like that. Anyway, in the first cat’s absence, the second cat orders a couple of BLTs and a side order of that stuff that looks like cat’s vomit, which I can never remember the name of but it’s the white messy stuff that you get with salads. What the cat doesn’t know is that in some of the less reputable sandwich bars, the similarity to cat’s vomit is not entirely coincidental.

Anyway, ten minutes later both of the cats are sitting on a wall enjoying their lunch. The first cat has forgotten about the unfortunate menu item, and is tucking into his sandwich. He lifts up the cardboard lid and peeps into the foil box containing the white salady stuff, and recognises yesterday’s dinner.

Fortunately yesterday’s dinner was curried chicken and chips, a particular favourite, so the first cat relishes the opportunity of re-living a previous supper, although he does carry quite a sizeable resentment at having to pay for it all over again. He only hopes that some work went into the re-preparation of his recycled dish, in which case he would feel a little less ripped off.

At this point I feel I should address my own website’s loyal readers who no doubt have stepped over here to see what I’m up to, and are a little surprised. They’re good people, and they’re used to cute little cartoons about talking kittens, and the odd article about nothing in particular.

And now they come here to find me writing about cat’s vomit, and resorting to crude, unnecessary words like “shit”, and “crapface”. Oh wait a minute I haven’t used that one yet. Well anyway, I understand how you feel.

But look at the likes of RazZ. Basically what he does over here is sit down for a couple of minutes, string together a few swear words and a topic of the day, and manage to make you laugh your ass off. It’s genius. Tonnes of people read it. And it’s much, much easier than what I do at the other place. And frankly, I want a piece of it.

I always like to have a piece of things.

I think it’s my natural instincts kicking in. Just yesterday my cat, Harry, was eating a dead mouse, and I couldn’t help myself. I jumped onto the rug and before I knew it, I’d taken a huge bite of fur out of Harry’s ass.

Harry was real pissed. He’d been planning on entering his ass in the local “Cute Donkey” competition, but now that he had a huge hole in his fur, all he was good for was lugging coals home from the shop. That might have been fine twenty years ago, but we’ve got central heating now, and there’s no point filling up the whole house with filthy coal and soot, unless one of the cats is going to get pregnant and develop an insatiable appetite for coal, as I believe some women do. Personally, I wouldn’t ever have a female in the house. They pee all over the place and you have to keep taking them to the vet for jabs and things.

Anyway, till next week, I’m Neal, I’ve found my new spiritual home.

Neal’s Belch no. 167 for 16th Oct 2004

I’ve recently been looking into the possiblity of learning how to play a musical instrument of some kind.

Obviously this is a drastic step but I’ve been bored recently and the winters drawing in, and I have to fill my time up with something. I don’t like, any more than you do, the idea of creating more noise pollution that will further contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer and the change in the climates. If it helps, I’ll try to make sure that whichever instrument I choose is made of an environmentally friendly material such as plastic, so that when it ends up in a landfill it won’t rot and cause a smell.

Anyway I thought maybe the banjo.

Newer readers won’t be aware that some time ago I published an online course that caused a cultural revolution. For those who didn’t partake, here it is again.

NewsBurp University Course NBU-04: How to play the banjo

Although I, your lecturer for course NBU-04, have never played the banjo and have never handled one or read any books on how to play the banjo, I firmly believe that a good teacher can teach anything, regardless of knowledge and experience.

Playing the banjo can be a rewarding and fruitful hobby, in the right hands. In the wrong hands, it can have consequences that lead to the forced evacuation of your town or city, and can result in harsh economic sanctions being placed on your country by the international community.

First some background. In 1976, Christopher Columbus, the grandson of the explorer of the same name, was travelling by car to a second hand record market in Holland, where he hoped to pick up a bootleg copy of the yet-to-be-released unnamed fourth Led Zeppelin album. The one that some ignorant listeners mistakenly refer to as Led Zeppelin 4.

Anyway, on his way he took a brief diversion and inadvertently discovered America. Now, America had of course been discovered several hundred years before that, but everyone in Europe had sort of forgotten it existed. So it came as a complete surprise to find that there was another country at the other side of the big blue water-filled hole where they kept their inflatable matresses.

Suddenly everything made sense. They now knew where all those mysterious unidentified flying aeroplanes (UFAs) were coming from, and why the aliens who travelled in them always spend a couple of weeks harmlessly exploring museums and local McDonald’s branches, before disappearing without even bothering to kidnap anyone.

Anyway, this guy, Columbus Jnr (Jnr. was an abbreviation of Jennifer, a name of which he was not proud, because there was a much loathed serial killer at the time, by the name of Jennifer) , came back from America with a new musical instrument, and a couple of board games. At first people were skeptical.

“That’s pretty much just a violin that’s not made out of cat whiskers, isn’t it?”, they would say. They always said it in those exact words, because the well organised anti-banjo movement used to walk a hundred feet ahead of Columbus wherever he went, handing out cue cards to the locals.

(The anti banjo movement is now a political party, but in the interests of impartiality, the NewsBurp University will not tell you which one.)

Anyway, somehow the proponents of banjoism managed to overcome these hurdles, and nowadays it is rare to walk down a street and see a person who isn’t carrying a banjo. Well, that’s the history bit – let’s get down to learning how to play your banjo.

First, make sure you have oiled your musical instrument.And always adjust the “saddle” before attempting to play it. Now, assuming you’re right-handed, hold the handlebars in your left hand, put your right foot on the left paddle, and gentle push youself down the hill. When you have a momentum going, throw your right leg over the saddle and start peddling, remembering to watch out for traffic coming from behind.

Now you’re well on your w:ay. Well done. You’ve all passed.

After writing that lecture, it occurred to me that I should practise what I preach, so I went to my local musical intruments shop to purchase a banjo. There weren’t very many to choose from, so eventually I settled for a grand piano. Obviously I will have to modify the piano by removing several dozen strings from it until there are only six left. Otherwise it will become very confusing when I start to teach myself chords.

Not that I wouldn’t be up to the challenge of playing a sixty-four string banjo. It’s just that I need to make it portable, because otherwise I won’t be able to get it through the door of my apartment and I’ll have to leave it in the communal hallway where people will see it and mock me behind my back, and I won’t even know that they’re mocking me.

Which will be very frustrating because I hate it when I don’t know what people are up to. Just yesterday my cat was up to something in the back garden, and I knew nothing about it until early this morning when I noticed that the rotary clothes line now spins anti-clockwise in the wind, instead of clockwise.

My cat has always been opposed to forward-moving clocks. I think he’s a bit touchy because he’s on his seventh life, and is finally becoming very conscious of the passing of time. He really should chill out though. Maybe learn to play the banjo or something.

Come to think of it, I bought him a banjo a few years ago. But if I remember rightly, he proudly asserted that his whiskers were much more musical than the banjo strings. He’s always been tremendously proud of his whiskers.

Which is stupid, because it’s not as if he designed them. He is just the lucky cat to whom they have been given, and he has nothing to be proud about. Whoever created them, on the other hand, should stand up and take a bow. They really are quiet remarkable. I’ve hired a cat tuner who visits every few months, and also cleans the chimneys. I might get him to start tuning my piano banjo while he’s here.

Anyway, two cats walk into a bar.

One of them immediately walks out in disgust when he notices that the pub band does not contain a banjo player. The other cat, being more open to new cultural experiences, sits and watches the band while drinking an imported semi-skimmed, semi-pasterised, mixture of goat’s milk and cow’s orange juice.

After a while he remembers a book that he read about the cruel methods used by the manufacturers who extract orange juice from cows. Apparantly they distract the cow by waving a red rag at it and making it feel so proud about the fact that it’s been mistaken for a Spanish fighting bull. While the cow is engrossed in it’s new-found, unfounded and short lived feeling of self esteem, they steal it’s orange juice and replace it with cheap beer.

The cat, on remembering this, stands up in disgust and walks out of the bar.

Where he goes after that is not relevent. I could tell you what he does next, but where would it end? I can’t just sit here describing every minute of the rest of his life That would take years, and I’d get hungry and tired from all the typing and stuff. Get off my back.