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.

Neal’s Belch no. 166 for 11th Oct, 2004

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “quad ete demonstrandum”, which of course means “buyer beware”.

People should always be very careful when buying things. Once, for example, a friend of mine bought a crocodile skin handbag for his wife. It was not untill three weeks later that it emerged that the crocodile was not dead, just in a deep coma. Luckily it didn’t wake up, and his wife simply detached the crocodile from it’s life support machine, which was sewn into the inner lining.

Of course, this raises various ethical questions. But I’m not going to answer those here. I am, after all, not a theologian. I just happen to give off an air of great wisdom and higher knowledge, so people tend to ask me these sorts of questions.

I suppose, in a way, I’m a bit like the doctor who, whenever he goes to the pub, gets asked to look at people’s discoloured tongues and faulty limbs.

When I go to the pub I’m invariably asked which end of the bar the two cats will be sitting at when they arrive. Everybody always wants to sit beside the two cats, because they know from reading this website that when two cats walk into a bar, things are going to happen.

Personally I think it’s sad that people have to live vicarously off the exitement of other patrons in a bar. In my day, we used to create our own entertainment. I remember as a child, being told to stand on top of the televison, my arms outstretched, so that it looked like I was standing on top of the girl on the tightrope on The Paul Daniels Show.

This often backfired, and I was made to look really stupid when the camera shot changed to show a bucket of elephant droppings. My family would shout things like “you’re standing in a bucket of elephant crap, you numbskull”. I of course retained my dignity and explained that I was merely dropping my standards in order to entertain my low brow siblings and parents with the only sort of childish humour that they were capable of understanding.

After that one of them invariably proved me wrong by switching over to Newsnight, and apparantly understanding every word of it. Which doesn’t really make sense to me because “newsnight” is, itself, not a real word.

It was made up by a broadcasting organisation that was too trendy to use real words, so they had to make one up. Of course that all misfired on them when it turned out that by sheer chance, the new word with which they came up happened to look exactly like a combination of the words “news” and “night”.I do hope you’re following this.

Anyway, two cats walk into a bar. One of them drinks some Guinness and nothing much happens to him. The other cat also drinks some Guinness, and nothing of any great interest occurs in his evening, either.

So of course the barman panics, realising that his customers are going to become infuriated when they realise that they are to be deprived of the usual entertainment derived from the two cats’ antics.

He decides to rent a clown for the night.

So the clown turns up, and tells a few jokes but unfortunately he doesn’t do anything cat related. So the audience applaud politely but clearly they are not satisfied at all. And the barman also realises that perhaps if he got out of the habit of referring to them as an “audience”, and just called them patrons instead, they might lower their expectations of their night out, and he would be under less pressure.

But it’s too late, he realised, to worry about that now. Anyway, the barman fails to come up with anything else to entertain the aud- I mean patrons, and many of them go home perhaps twenty or thirty minutes earlier than they otherwise have, due to there being nothing to keep them there.

The upshot of all this was that takings for the evening were around eight percent lower than normal, although the accounts have not yet been signed off on for this year, and that figure is not official.

Neal’s Belch no. 163 for 1st Oct, 2004

I’ve always been fascinated by the ability of seagulls to fly through dry, non salty air which doesn’t even have any fishes swimming around in it.

You don’t see whales doing that. They just beach themselves and wait for the locals to either hire a crane or chop them up into whale fillets while a passing seagull craps happily over them from above. I think it’s something to do with the way they’re brought up. Seagulls tend to be encouraged to leave the nest. By the age of eighteen, your average seagull has moved out from home and is either living at University or in a bedsitingroom apartment somewhere near the big city.

Whales, on the other hand, carry on living in the sea with their extended family for their entire lives.

They dream of leaving, of course. But when there are only seven seas to choose from they are bound to end up living near relatives no matter where they go to. That’s the sad truth about whales and seagulls Although obviously it’s not sad for the seagulls, except the ones who care about whales – but there’s not too many of those.

The seagull is a selfish creature, not given to thinking about the needs of other creatures with whom it is forced, as the seagull sees it, to share the earth. The seagull would be much happier if it had a whole planet to itself.

Seagullworld would be a haven of peacefullness and amphibianity, where nobody ever gets stranded on beaches and the seagulls don’t get made into whale fillets, unless there’s a new young trainee chef on the block who can’t tell the difference between a seagull and a whale, and who also has the ability to fly.

But there aren’t very many of those.

Chefs’ hats, you see, are built to a very un-aerodynamic design. This is done to comply with one of the hygiene regulations, which states that people who work in the preparation of food for public consumption, must wear headgear that is not likely to blow away if a gust of air shoots out from a just-opened oven. A quite legitimate concern, of course, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of making chefs unable to fly, at least while they’re on duty.

Nurses don’t generally have this problem, by the way.

Their hats are much more aerodynamically shaped. Unfortunately, this (mostly female) sector of the medical profession is racked with inhibitions and lack confidence in their flying abilities, so it is very rare, if ever, that you will see a nurse flying over a dead whale and crapping on everybody.

Unlike the good old confident seagull.

Personally, I don’t hardly ever fly at all. When I want to go somewhere that is a particularly long way away from me, I generally hire the services of a commericial airliner and a pilot. I keep the cost down by sharing the aeroplane with a few hundred other paying passengers, and we keep the toilet facilities to a minimum.

Sometimes we splash out and arrange for a motion picture to be shone onto a screen on the inside of the aircraft, if it’s a transatlantic flight like the one I will be taking in a couple of weeks.

In the olden days, before there were planes, people used to have to drive everywhere, and it was a right royal pain in the ass. The car used to get wet and the salt water would damage the paintwork, and sometimes the car would sink, and you’d have to flag someone down and get them to tow you back up to the surface.

There was no such thing as in-car entertainment, either. The local radio stations in the middle of the atlantic are mostly intolerable, producing low brow nonsense aimed mainly at sea horses who like to listen to horse racing commentaries and who spend their days fantasising about the life of their athletic cousins who live on dry land.

For some reason they are envious of land horses, who get to run around a track and who spend their Sunday afternoons hoping they don’t trip over a snail and break their legs, because we all know what happens to horses whose legs get broken, don’t we? If a human breaks a leg, it gets put in a plaster and it’s all fine after a few weeks. But apparently the medical treatment for horses with the same ailment is different, in that they get shot in the head rather than bandaged up.

Neal’s Belch 165 for 7th Oct, 2004

A short, short time ago, in a galaxy not too far from here – unless of course you subscribe to the rather old fashioned linear view of distance and time, in which case it’s gazillions of light years away – two cats walked into a bar. One of the cats was already substantially intoxicated, having partaken in an organised pub crawl earlier in the evening. The other cat was dead, but had been spotted by a taxidermist and stuffed. Unfortunately his fur had become infected with ants and effectively this was a walking ant colony, not a cat. The ants, invigorated by their collective, new-found ability to walk on four legs and get let into a bar disguised as a deceased cat, were taking full advantage of the situation.

Anyway, the first cat – or to be accurate, the only one of the two creatures who can truly and accurately be described as a cat – goes up to the bar and orders a Guinness. It all goes fine, and he gets his Guinness and sits down and it’s nice and we don’t need to worry about that particular cat any more. He had a nice evening and a rather entertaining one too, which he spent watching the other “cat” trying to order a drink.

I say “trying” to order a drink, because when you’re not really a cat but a dead stuffed cat covered in millions of ants, each of whom have individual tastes in beverages, it’s not easy to order a drink. The powerful right wing anti-alcohol lobby in the colony managed to make the most noise, so in the end the “cat” ordered a pint of milk and a cheese sandwich. Although several of the younger anti globalisation ants complained that the idea that cats are partial to cheese, is a stereotype created by the media. But nobody listened because they were hungry, and after all, you don’t get much choice in a pub. Unless you like corned beef, which cats don’t. I know they don’t because I heard it in the media.

Several years later, a dog walked into the same bar. The dog was alive, but infested with fleas, all of whom were thirsty. Luckily, fleas are all brainless and they will buy whatever the the advertisers throw at them. So the dog, who wanted a vodka lemonade, stood in front of a poster advertising vodca lemondade until all of the fleas had seen it and became convinced that the only thing that would make them happy was a serving of that beverage. So that all went fine.

It just goes to show, doesn’t it, that it’s much better to be a live dog infested with fleas, than a dead cat infested with ants. That’s what I draw from the story, anyway. Maybe you’ve read something different into it. And that’s fine. It’s not as if I’m trying to tell you what to think. If I was, I would do it subliminally. D r ink C o ca-Cola. But I don’t. I’ve always found that if you want to convince somebody of something, the best way to go about it is to get them drunk, bring them to a disreputable hypnotist, murder the hypnotist in cold blood and somehow convince the person, when they sober up, that they did it. Then all you have to do is tell them that you’ll keep quiet so long as they agree with everything you say. It’s as simple as that.

Anyway, the two cats had a great time in the end, even though one of them wasn’t a cat. The band were playing Queen songs and they both won t-shirts that said “I’m with stoopid”, and had an arrow pointing to the left. One of them chose to wear his upside-down. partly so that the arrow would point the other way, and partly because his neck was much thicker than his waist and he always wore t-shirts upside down. Which, by the way, was the reason why he was dead. He had, a couple of days before, underestimated the width of his neck when choosing a new collar and tie, and choked himself to death. It just goes to show, doesn’t it, that it’s very important to get measured properly when buying clothing.

By the way I noticed, while writing this several years ago, that “ants” is almost an anagram of “cats”. Almost.

Neal’s Belch no. 164 for 5th Oct, 2004

Several years ago I was walking along my local river bank, checking out the security system and making draft plans for an upcoming bank robbery that I might be involved in, when I noticed a funny thing.

A clown was sitting on a large rock just under the bridge, throwing custard pies at his imaginary friend and sounding the horn on his battered old car. Now, you may think that’s a little corny, and I’m inclined to agree, but I burst out laughing nevertheless.

And as a result I was arrested for scaring a small child who was passing at the time. While I was languishing in the police cell an inmate taught me how to pick locks with my toenails, so obviously I decided I was never going to cut them again.

Soon after, I rented a stall for the weekend at my local outdoor market and offered all of my toenail scissors for sale to the general public. I had intended to use the proceeds to pay back a friend who had put up the bail money, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a profit. This was mainly due to the exhorbitant and prohibitive cost of primetime television advertising slots here in Ireland.

Not being one to give up, I invested my hundred Euro losses in a consolidation loan. Unfortunately I inadvertently used the same bank that I had been seen acting suspiciously in a few days before, and I somehow ended up in jail again.

This time I decided that if any other inmate offered to teach me a usefull skill, I would immediately jam both of my forefingers in my ears and sing the loud rock part of “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the top of my voice to avoid acquiring any information that could get me into further trouble. Unfortunately this tactic caused me not to hear the screws banging on the door with my meals, and as a result I ended up in hospital being treated for malnutrition.

The hospital staff were lovely, I must say, and I felt very well looked after.

They even cut my toenails and offered to direct me to a store where I could replenage my supply of toe nail clippers and get back to where I was before I made my foolish mistakes. Sadly they didn’t tell me that I would have to pay for these instruments.

So I ended up back in jail for shoplifting. While I was languishing in the police cell an inmate taught me how to pick locks with my toenails, so obviously I decided I was never going to cut them again.

For that reason, I rented a stall for the weekend at my local outdoor market and offered all of my toenail scissors for sale to the general public. I had intended to use the proceeds to pay back a friend who had put up the bail money, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a profit.

This was mainly due to the exhorbitant and prohibitive cost of primetime television advertising slots here in Ireland.However, I had such a headache from the stress of going bankrupt that I went to the doctor.

It was nothing serious, I’m glad to say.

But he did say that I had a tendency to get my stories confused and sometimes even repeat things as if they had happened more than once in my life. Apparently it’s a bit like “deja-vu”, except that you don’t know it’s happening until a doctor points it out to you.

Anyway the following day, I went to the doctor, because I had a headache from the enormous stress of having gone out of business. Luckily, it was nothing serious. And he just gave me some pills.