Neal’s Belch no. 176 from late 2004

Back in the old days in the wild wild west, there were of course very few, if indeed any at all, women. We had to make do with what we could get, and if the dog was on heat, well you damn well made sure that you got what you needed out of the situation.

You’d usually get the dog to mate with the neighbour’s scruff bag and produce some puppies which you could then trade for some magic beans, have an adventure involving a giant at the top of the resulting bean plant, and survive to sell your story to a publisher for millions of Euro, so that you became wealthy and therefore a more eligible and well-known prospect.

My own great grandfather owned several puppy farms in the late eighteen hundreds, and my mother’s attic is full of mementos and keepsakes from those days. Yesterday I was up there looking for one of Bowsy the bear’s eyes, which seem to have gone missing at some point between 1999 and 2004, when he was living in the attic. That’s got nothing to do with the story. I just thought that it would be nice to mention my oldest surviving childhood bear, and perhaps stretch the “mention” out to two or three paragraphs. If any of you have a problem with that, talk to the hand.

Be aware, though, that the hand only understands sign language, and furthermore has an extremely limited vocabulary. Unlike you, the hand has not had the privilege of a taxpayer funded education, and the benefit of a loving home and a varied social life. The highlight of my hand’s day is when I wash him with cheap liquid soap, after I’ve been to the toilet.

As a matter of fact, I have two hands. But one of them is rather shy, and prefers that I don’t mention him in these essays. And I think that’s perfectly understandable. Just because I am in an extremely public position here as a future renowned content creator, that doesn’t mean I have a right to bring to the fore the private lives of my hand. So let’s leave it at that, and let them have their privacy. Please, please, leave my hands alone to get on with their lives.

Anyway, me and Bowsy go way back.

I first met him when, as a rather troublesome eight year old, I applied for a position as “circus freak”, on the basis that I don’t have a belly button. Bowsy was working in the circus’ personnel department at the time, and was sent to check out my story. And I must say he was very thorough.

First he telephoned all of my references at the maternity hospital and the orphanage where I was alleged to have exposed my belly button three weeks previously. Damn liars they were. They didn’t even have the guts to make a police statement. But at least they agreed to vouch for the absence of my belly button, so they came in useful after all.

Bowsy also lifted up my t shirt and had a look at the hole where my belly button should be. In the end, after a long and pregnant silence, he simply said “Yup”. Then he went quiet again. That was the first and last time I have ever heard Bowsy speak.

No matter how much I’ve tried in the intervening years, I can’t get a word out of him, even when I offer him marmalade sandwiches, which he loves, and a keg of beer to loosen his tongue. Last time I did that, he accused me, through a solicitor’s letter, of “trying to introduce him to the demons of drink so that I could have my wicked way with him”. The “him” at the end of the letter – the glaringly visible use of the third party, was a dead giveaway. Clearly this was all the solicitor’s idea, and Bowsy would never say such a thing about me.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the legal profession. Maybe it’s because of the time when I sued the circus for wrongful dismissal, after they discovered my fake rubber “empty belly button hole” prosthesis, and the bastards counter-sued me for fraud.

During the trial, I stood up and made an impassioned speech about liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the vintage comic actor George Burns, star of one of my favourite films “Oh God, you Devil”, who had sadly passed away the previous day at the age of one hundred, and who I felt deserved a mention. The jury looked at me as if I had two heads.

And as it happens, I did. Perhaps in hindsight I should have applied for the “two-headed freak” position at the circus instead of the absent belly-button job. But those were the early days of my career and I wanted to ensure I didn’t get typecast.. I suppose I could have benefited from a visit to a careers advisor before I ventured out into the big bad world.

The ironic thing about all of this is that I honestly do not have a belly button. But I felt naked without one, and frankly the cavity looks rather vulgar, so underneath the no-belly-button prosthesis, I had a belly button prosthesis, which I wore when I went to the freelance make-up artist who designed a no-belly-button prosthesis to fit over it. I managed to convince her that I had a belly-button, which I said I wanted her to cover up.

She also disguised my second head as a mole. And that’s been the bane of my existence ever since. I can’t go anywhere without some asshole asking why there’s a mole on my shoulder, and irritating kids coming up to me wanting to pet it because he looks “cute”. It’s a mole, for chrissakes, not a kitten. These are the same little bastards who dig holes all over your garden, which cause your cat to trip over and break its neck.

And your cat, after all, isn’t trying to cause any harm. It’s just going about minding its own business, looking for a small, fertile rodent to kill and extract milk from, such are a cat’s natural instincts. I say we stand up and do something about these damn moles who go around interfering with our thirsty cats.

Neal’s Belch 184 for 22nd Dec 2004

I’ve always found the misuse of language irritating. Just yesterday I saw a Spanish dictionary being used to prop up a leg of a table that was a bit wobbly. Worse still is the use of the symbol @ instead of the word “at”. Everybody knows that @ must only be used for two things; e-mail addresses and price labels on items of fresh produce that are sold by weight.

Pricing items according to how much they weigh is ridiculous. Just because something weighs two pounds, that doesn’t mean that two pounds is an appropriate resale value. Not least because we no longer use the pound here in Ireland. We prefer to use shiny chocolate buttons instead. I’ve always been a great admirer of people who indulge in the chocolate button. It displays a great self-control, to be able to wear that much confectionery on one’s clothes without getting stains all over the place. Not only that, I’m amazed they don’t just eat them when they get hungry.

It can be very difficult, even for the best of us, not to succumb to temptation. The late Mother Teresa said it best, when she said (at an awards ceremony) “The reason why I don’t have very many possessions, is because I ate most of them. By the way, thanks for this engraved thing. Is it edible? It sort looks like it might hurt my teeth”

Dental problems of course, have always been a great problem in the third world. When you get hungry, you’re bound to eat all of the toothpaste. Who wouldn’t? Several years ago I came up with a practical solution to this, which involved making the toothpaste taste less nice.

Sadly, few if any of the manufacturers took it up, and as a result I have had to sell my house to pay back the mortgage that I took out on foot of my expected earnings from the patent.

In the end it was okay though.

There was a clerical error at the bank and they accidentally gave me a new mortgage on the bank building itself. The lobby can be a little cold and uninviting but there’s a porter who opens the door for me and knows me by name, although he tends to get a little less friendly around four pm when he’s trying to empty out the bank so his friends can rob the place.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of bank porters. They seem to spend half the day smiling maniacally at people, and the other half of the day locking things. If they wanted to do that all day they would have been beter advised to take a job as a canal lock operator. Assuming, that is, that somebody was prepared to offer such a position. What with automated canal staff and ship’s cats nowadays, there are fewer and fewer jobs available in the water industry.

I myself was once part of that industry, when I worked at a bottled water manufacturing plant, and my job was to go out onto the lake and gather up the water in the plastic bottles, ready to be sent to the shops. There were strict quality control measures in place, and I was required to throw back any water that looked dirty or had amoebas swimming around in it.

People are so prejudiced againts ameobas, and with no cause. They are the most modest, simple life form in the universe, apart from their arrogant insistance on having millions of square miles of raging sea to live in, when they’ll never be able to do anyway except float about in it

But that was a great time in my life, bottling fresh water to be shipped to the thirsty in Mother Teresa’s hospital in Calcutta. I felt like I was contributing something important to society, thereby serving out my one hundred hours of community service for robbing the bank that I live in.

13th Dec, 2004 – A MatchstickCats.com Editorial

It seems incomprehensible to any ordinary decent person, that parents would insist on forcing their children to eat their “greens” so that they’ll grow up big. For one thing, some of us don’t eat our vegetables and instead consume large quantities of chocolate and beer, yet have still managed to grow to a very substantial size.

But besides that, it’s been clear since the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, that we are going about this nutrition thing the wrong way. Vegetables, the evidence clearly shows, are the cause of some of the worst menaces the world has ever seen. Plant a couple of supposedly innocent beans in the ground, and next thing you know you have a child-eating maniac living at the top of a bean plant in your back garden. And that, we can be sure, is a recipe for disaster. Especially if your cat is sitting there when it starts to sprout.

A cat, when it starts to sprout, really is intolerable. It’s so embarassing trying to explain it to the vet, and besides, most of us don’t even like sprouts. We just eat them because it’s Christmas and you’re supposed to. We, the ordinary people, would far rather be eating a nice plate of melted cheese on toast, and maybe a beer or two to wash it down. It’s very important to wash your cheese down before you eat it. You don’t know what it’s been doing or where it’s been, and there’s no point in taking any chances now is there?

Unless of course you’ve just landed on the “go to jail” box. If that happens, you may as well take a chance card. There’s every possibility that you might get the one that says “Get out of jail free”. One of the writers here at Matchstick Cats much prefers draughts. He has always loved them, with their long necks and speckly coats. They really are the highlight of his trips to the zoo, now that he’s been banned from the wild cats section, after I disguised my he disguised his domestic cat in a lion’s costume to see try to get accepted into the community.

But it was all in the interests of science, and that cat is now the proud mother of three lion cubs who will replenish the zoo’s stock in years to come, when they run out of antelope meat.

You know, that damn butcher is always running out of things. Yesterday he was seen running out of the local bank after allegedly performing an armed robbery.

Luckily we mark all of our banknotes before we lodge our takings into the bank every day, and we were able to check through binocolulars* that none of the money with which he was running away, was the property of this website.

Anyway, two butchers walk out of a bank.

At that very moment, two black cats cross their paths, on their way to a bar. Unfortunately they are still some minutes away from the bar, so they won’t get there on time for a traditional “two cats walk into a bar” story at the end of today’s piece. Sorry about that. It turns out black cats don’t bring good luck if they cross your path in pairs.

The one exception to that, is if you are walking along two parallel paths simultaneously, with one foot on each path. But you have to make sure that each cat only crosses one of the paths. And that’s quite a difficult thing to achieve. Let’s be honest, the only way this is going to happen is if their starting point is between the two paths, and they both walk in opposite directions. And when, if ever, is that going to happen?

Exactly. People are so unrealistic about these things.

Especially holograms. Holograms are so out of touch with reality, Just yesterday a hologram asked one of our staff whether he could have cheese for breakfast. Clearly the fault lies with rushed software releases for the Christmas market, and just plain bad programming at Microsoft.

And that is why this site has recently been re-designed to be best viewed in Mozilla Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer.

A “MatchstickCats.com Editorial” for 13th Dec, 2004

It seems incomprehensible to any ordinary decent person, that parents would insist on forcing their children to eat their “greens” so that they’ll grow up big. For one thing, some of us don’t eat our vegetables and instead consume large quantities of chocolate and beer, yet have still managed to grow to a very substantial size.

But besides that, it’s been clear since the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, that we are going about this nutrition thing the wrong way.

Vegetables, the evidence clearly shows, are the cause of some of the worst menaces the world has ever seen. Plant a couple of supposedly innocent beans in the ground, and next thing you know you have a child-eating maniac living at the top of a bean plant in your back garden. And that, we can be sure, is a recipe for disaster. Especially if your cat is sitting there when it starts to sprout.

A cat, when it starts to sprout, really is intolerablen It’s so embarassing trying to explain it to the vet, and besides, most of us don’t even like sprouts. We just eat them because it’s Christmas and you’re supposed to. We, the ordinary people, would far rather be eating a nice plate of melted cheese on toast, and maybe a beer or two to wash it down. It’s very important to wash your cheese down before you eat it. You don’t know what it’s been doing or where it’s been, and there’s no point in taking any chances now is there?

Unless of course you’ve just landed on the “go to jail” box.

If that happens, you may as well take a chance card. There’s every possibility that you might get the one that says “Get out of jail free”. One of the writers here at Matchstick Cats much prefers draughts. He has always loved them, with their long necks and speckly coats. They really are the highlight of his trips to the zoo, now that he’s been banned from the wild cats section, after he disguised his domestic cat in a lion’s costume to see if it would be accepted into the community.

But it was all in the interests of science, and that cat is now the proud mother of three baby lion cubs who will replenish the zoo’s stock in years to come, when they run out of antelope meat.

You know, that damn butcher is always running out of things. Yesterday he was seen running out of the local bank after allegedly performing an armed robbery. Luckily we mark all of our banknotes before we lodge our takings into the bank every day, and we were able to check through binocolulars* that none of the money with which he was running away, was the property of this website.

Anyway, two butchers walk out of a bank.

At that very moment, two black cats cross their paths, on their way to a bar. Unfortunately they are still some minutes away from the bar, so they won’t get there on time for a traditional “two cats walk into a bar” story at the end of today’s piece. Sorry about that. It turns out black cats don’t bring good luck if they cross your path in pairs.

The one exception to that, is if you are walking along two parallel paths simultaneously, with one foot on each path. But you have to make sure that each cat only crosses one of the paths. And that’s quite a difficult thing to achieve. Let’s be honest, the only way this is going to happen is if their starting point is between the two paths, and they both walk in opposite directions. And when, if ever, is that going to happen?

Exactly.

People are so unrealistic about these things. Especially holograms. Holograms are so out of touch with reality, Just yesterday a hologram asked one of our staff whether he could have cheese for breakfast. Clearly the fault lies with rushed software releases for the Christmas market, and just plain bad programming at Microsoft.

And that is why this site has recently been re-designed to be best viewed in Mozilla Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer.

*those are a bit like binoculars, but spelt incorrectly

Published as Neal’s Belch no. 181, in December 2004, using a previous Belch combined with the contents of a MatchstickCats.com newsetter, apparently.

A number of years ago a man came to my front door and knocked and knocked and knocked until I gradually came to the realisation that he needed me to open it. So I slowly lifted myself up off the sofa, where I had been watching Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and dragged myself all the way across the sitting room and the hall and the porch, where I pressed my nose up against the window and laughed my ass off until the sun went down.

I stopped laughing then because I am incurably terrified of darkness. My entire house is made of glass, and is itself a giant light bulb. You may think that I would feel safe there, but I live in constant fear of the day when the bulb needs changing. It takes weeks and weeks to get a mortgage approved and what the hell am I going to do in the meantime? I suppose I could climb into a tent and light a few candles, but they don’t light up the whole room. I need every inch of my living space to be drenched in light. Otherwise I won’t notice if the bogeyman is hiding in the shadows.

Not that I’m afraid of the bogeyman. It’s just that I was a little rude to him in a pub once, and I’d rather not have to explain myself to him now that I’ve sobered up. I know he’d forgive me instantly but it would be tremendously embarrassing and we’d have to hug or something at the end of it, and us males just don’t do hugging, unless it’s with a cute girl or a cute cat or something. Or a teddy bear of course, but we usually stop that after around age twenty two, because you have to grow up sometime don’t you. I myself have only eight teddy bears left, and almost all of them live in my mummy’s house miles and miles away and I only get to see them when I go home at the weekend. And when I do, they’re usually too tired to do anything, because she drags them around the shops all day and brings them to picnics and Santa’s grotto and the North Pole and the Zoo and the Toothpaste Factory and the horizon in a little green boat.

You know, I remember a time when the North Pole was considered to be too far away to visit on a day trip. Then people realised that the days are longer at the Artic. Or the Antarctic. I can never remember which. So they just set their watches to North Pole time before they left, and kept them on that time for the rest of their lives so that they never ever had to deal with the six days that they had lost somewhere during their journey. If you see somebody running for a bus because they haven’t arrived on time, the chances are that it’s a former Artic / Antarctic explorer.

Arctic Cats are lovely, by the way. They’re all hairy and, unlike Huskies, they don’t fart much because they’re all vegetarians. There’s no point being a Carnivore if you live at the North Pole, because you can’t get any salt there. Ironically, all of the salt water has been frozen to make ice for the Camels to put in their water in the Sahara Desert . Camels prefer ice to water, because it doesn’t swirl about in their humps. It stays still. Anyway where was I?

Apparently you’re not supposed to drink sea-water. The reason they give is that the salt will only make you thirsty, and want to drink more sea-water. What’s the problem? There’s a whole ocean available to you. And if you do manage to drink the whole lot, you will eventually replenish the supply through the body’s natural functions.

We as a society really must stop unquestioningly accepting these so-called old wisdoms. If the wind changes, your face may well stay like that, but maybe you like it that way. After all, that was why you pulled that face in the first place, wasn’t it?

The early bird does indeed catch the worm, but personally I prefer toast and marmalade, so I can live with that.

And as for “Cast ne’er a clout, before spring is out”, I’ll do my clout-casting in whichever season suits me, thank you very much. They don’t even give a reason why you shouldn’t cast your clout before spring is out. You’re supposed to just accept it because it rhymes and because it sounds sort of clever and cultural and Gaelic.

And then there’s the one that goes “A watched pot never boils”. I hope I don’t have to explain to you why that is simply factually inaccurate.

And besides, a pot doesn’t boil. The liquid inside it does. If the pot itself boils, you are an employee of a steel-works, and you have confused your place of work with your kitchen. And if I were you I wouldn’t touch that pot for a while, either. Not unless you want to get burnt to death.

Of course, if you do want to get burnt to death, go ahead, knock yourself out. Or get someone else to knock you out, which might be easier. You could even turn it into some sort of clown act, if you wanted to.

I like clowns.

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.