Tetherd Cow Ahead

I’m sure that you are all aware of the current movie phenomenon of ‘reboots’ – they’re everywhere these days, what with the reinvented Batman, the new Star Trek, the latest Sherlock Holmes and so on. In case this trend has passed you by, basically what happens is that a movie studio takes something that has run out of sequel potential and ‘reboots’ it by making the concept ‘hipper’, by editing it in a snappy fashion, and by casting it with some flavour-of-the-month actors.

When I recently read that they’re rebooting the Spiderman franchise I realised that the time is fast approaching where the reboots are going to come so quick on the heels of the original flick that studios will be in danger of rebooting films that haven’t even been made. This of course means that there is a grave and frightening chance of movies achieving originality – a situation that is plainly not acceptable.

In order that we may head off this alarming possibility, I have decided to launch the concept of the cross-boot. It works like this: you find two previously successful movies and mash them into a hybrid that will in fact appeal to even more people than either of the sources. For instance, Driving Miss Daisy, a film that was a hit with the ma & pa generation could be merged with a science-fiction action piece like, oh, Robocop say, to produce a film that simply can’t fail to bring the whole family together:

One of the problems that studios perennially face is the dreaded ‘couples’ dilemma. When he wants to watch an action movie and she is up for a chick flick, unhappiness inevitably follows for one⁽ⁱ⁾ of the parties. But with the cross-boot, no more disputes! If we take the lead character from Alien³ and force her to make a choice about which of her alien spawn she should keep, we obviously get:

In this mutation of two much-loved motion pictures, Ripley’s dilemma is transformed, via thrilling action drama, into a tear-jerker of unparalleled poignancy. Who could possibly be disappointed?!

But the icing on the cake for the cross-boot should surely be smashing a humungous Pixar/Disney animation hit into a killer⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ vintage horror flick: a cute robot tries to fit in but is mercilessly mocked by his ‘friends’. In a bone-chilling fit of uncontrolled rage he wreaks his bloody vengeance…

The most discerning among you will have figured out by now that, aside from saving the motion picture industry from certain ignominy, all this amounts to the possibility of a Cow Competition… so, get to it! A wondrous TCA coffee mug goes to the winner. Plus, of course the fantabulous glory of saying you were funnier than me.

[The Rules: a pithy and amusing synopsis, plus title, plus cleverly Photoshopped poster mashup. Those of you without mad PShop skillz may enter, but your synopsis will have to be ultra funny to have a chance at the prize]

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Footnotes:

1. Or both – the loser takes up the right to sulk for the entire duration of the film [↩]
2. Literally [↩]

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*Spawn Of Satan

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One of my favoured blog visits is Matt’s Musings, where artist and machinima magician Matt Kelland muses often on things that pin the Interest-O-Meter. Recently, after having indulged in the old internet meme of ‘Making Your Own Record Cover’, Matt was musing about whether designers might find themselves eventually replaced by some kind of quasi-random system for generating ‘artwork’.

If you’ve not played the Record Cover Game game it goes like this:

1: Go here, to get a random image – picture #3, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

2: Go here to get a random Wikipedia article – this will be the name of your artist.

3: Go here to get a random quote, the last four or five words of which will be the name of your album.

Combine the ingredients in a photo editing app such as Photoshop, and voila! – Instant Design Skillz and a new Number One with a Bullet!

Here’s a nifty example which I just made according to those rules:

Cool! Not something I’d pick up in a record shop, probably, but you never know – I’m pretty fond of Arab Pop…

But as I mentioned to Matt, my feeling is that designers are safe for a while yet. Even in the ‘Mafitah al-Janan’ effort above (which in my opinion would have been rejected by all but the most feeble of A&R people) I’ve employed at least a little discrimination… it’s hard not to want to use at least some slightly tasteful fonts and a complementary colour scheme.

I told Matt that I was skeptical of much true artistic merit in the Record Cover Game – the dice are far too loaded. Using the above rules, you get offered a generally high standard of images, excellent quotes and the possibility of some unusual and meaningful parings – the path to this point has been well-and-truly paved by creative people. Next, stir in a little of your own artiness (even the tiniest amount…) and, well, it’s not unreasonable to expect a half-decent outcome. But, I speculated, what if you truly randomize the process. What if you try and take out any innate taste? Do you still come up with anything you’d want to display on your cd shelf? And I spun up a few examples which I posted in Matt’s comments.

They were SO terrible, in fact, that I actually started having fun… so now, in true TCA fashion, I’m reinventing the Record Cover Meme.

Acowlytes! This is your quest: go now and make the very WORST record cover you can. A cover that would ensure your future as a designer was well and truly dead, buried and pissed upon.

These are the NEW rules:

1: Go here, to get a random image. Image #3 – no matter what it is – will be your album cover.

2: Go here to get a random website – the first 3 or 4 words of the first link on the page is the name of your band.

3: Go here to get a random cliché – the third one on the list is the name of your album.

4: Arrange the elements in a photo editing app such as Photoshop according to the following restrictions: try to pick a random font and a random colour for each of the titles (how you opt to do this is up to you, but I trust you to play fair and try and be as truly random as possible).

5: You must put your artist name along the TOP of the image, and your album name along the BOTTOM. No creative placement allowed!

Maybe you’ll arrive at something as appalling appealing as this:

Or this:

I certainly hope so. Put it where we can see it and post a link in Comments. Let’s show Matt what kind of world we’d have without anyone at the design controls…†

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† In fact, these monstrosities are frighteningly similar to the kinds of ‘artwork’ you see in those annoying leaflets people shove under your front door. Coincidence?

BTW – I totally swear I made those two bad ‘covers’ using the rules outlined above – the way the title in the second one interacted with the text on the image was entirely random. Sometimes random can be mighty entertaining.

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*Spawn Of Satan

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Regular readers of The Cow will know that I don’t much go in for blog memes, but also that I do make the occasional exception. Yoo has thrown down the The Atheist Thirteen Gauntlet and so, in light of all the current religious insanity in these parts, and my increasing concern that rationality is being eroded faster than a sandcastle in a tsunami, I’m sitting in The Comfy Chair for this one. Mr Parkinson, let the questioning commence:

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?

Well, as I said in comments on my post God Creates Atheists I’m more inclined toward the Wikipedia definition that says that atheism ‘…as an explicit position, either affirms the nonexistence of gods or rejects theism. When defined more broadly, atheism is the absence of belief in deities, alternatively called nontheism’ than the more conservative Oxford Dictionary interpretation that it is ‘the belief that God does not exist’.

I believe that there is no persuasive evidence for the existence of a God or Gods, and no reason to expect that any such evidence is likely to be forthcoming. The Oxford definition implies the need for proof of a negative, which is scientifically foolish, so I try and avoid falling into that particular pitfall. I hold that the likelihood of there being such a creature as God, especially a personal God that has any interaction with me or cares about what I do, is as remote as the likelihood that there are fairies or angels or unicorns.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

I was raised in an Anglican Christian church-going family and attended church every Sunday until about the age of 15 or 16, if I remember correctly. I sang in the boy’s choir and was ‘Confirmed’. In my teens I also believed that Tarot Cards could tell the future, that the Earth was being visited by aliens and that homeopathy could make my flu go away.

Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word?

Subversive.

Q4. What scientific endeavor really excites you?

The work by mathematicians like Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman on the theories of emergent complexity and their application to the way we understand the world. I am completely fascinated, perhaps to the point of obsession, with this subject. From following their work (which is substantiated by many other lines of research), I agree with them that is possible that very simple rules underpin all the extraordinary, vivacious, astonishing intricacy of the living universe.

(And if one more evangelizing Christian thinks that posing the question “Aha! Yes, but who made the rules!” is clever, or even pertinent, I may very well turn violent).

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community”, what would it be and why?

Well, I’ll interpret this question a little more widely than it might be intended, if I may, because my own view is that atheism follows on from adopting the basic tenets of proper critical thinking (although I know there are people who would disagree with me on that). So. If I had the means I would give the JREF and people like them billions of dollars in cold hard cash. Religions, especially the legacy religions like Catholicism and to a certain extent Islam, are cashed up in a manner that makes them extraordinarily powerful. The newer Evangelical religions, and whack-job cults like Scientology, are also rapidly gaining ground. Fear is a tremendous motivator when it comes to reinforcing religious belief, but there can be no doubt that in the Great Gears of the Irrational, money is the lubricant. The ‘atheist community’ (whatever that means), and more generally the skeptical community, both need money for education. Education is the best tool with which to fight superstition.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy”, what would be your first response?

“Here, my child, I’ve had your robes in the closet waiting for this moment. Welcome to the Church of the Tetherd Cow.”

Oh. Sorry, you meant a conventional religion didn’t you? Why would a child of mine ever want to do that? They’re not insane.

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

Favourite? Hmmm. Interesting word. It kind of depends so much on definition – Paul Davies, in his book The Goldilocks Enigma, puts up persuasive arguments for some kind of ‘creator’ of our universe, but it’s such a theoretical, distant and, to my mind, entirely inscrutable entity that it recedes into meaninglessness for any practical consideration. It’s a position that is quite literally irrefutable, and as a consequence, interesting to consider, perhaps, but pointless to debate.

As far as arguments for a personal God go, then the best one that I’ve ever had advanced to me came from a dear personal friend who once studied to be a Catholic priest (and who is still quite devout, despite being a gay man and therefore an abomination in the church in which he worships – go figure). This is how he put it (it was much more skillfully rendered than this, so I apologize to him for making it simplistic for the sake of brevity. I think he would agree that the essence is the same):

If your car breaks down (assuming you know nothing of mechanics) you take it to a mechanic who will have the knowledge to diagnose the problem, the ability to tell you what’s gone wrong, and the skill to fix it. You don’t need to understand much at all about the process to be able to get back in your car and drive away happily. What you do have to do, though, is put your trust in someone with more knowledge and skill than yourself in an area in which your expertise is limited. So, says my friend, we should use that same reasoning when it comes to God. In other words he argues that we should listen to those people who have thought more deeply and studied more widely, when it comes to religion, than perhaps we have done. And trust their judgement.

It’s a cogent point of view. And it’s not entirely easy to refute, if you think about it. But its weakness, in my view rests on a problem that besets religions and all other irrational belief systems at their very core. It is this: human beings are so very easily deceived by themselves and others, especially when the payoff is perceived to be high. For instance, if your mechanic does a bad job, your car starts sputtering and groaning and you take it back for another look. It’s pretty obvious, as is the quality of his work. If it keeps happening, you go find another mechanic. But if your priest does a bad job, and screws up the absolution of your sins, how are you ever going to know? “Just trust me,” says your priest – but unlike the mechanic, he is unable to offer you any graspable proof that he’s doing his job to the best of his ability. Or at all. He could be fooling you – how would you know? Worse, he could be fooling himself – how would either of you know…? Of course, he says that he has studied Aquinas and Paley and Hume and Pascal, and you know he speaks fluent Latin and has kissed the Pope’s ring, but really, he is just a human man and as easily deceived as anyone else. As are all the people he has studied. I think you can see where I’m going with this.

And if you think you’re the kind of person who can’t be fooled, you’re wrong.

Q8. What’s your most “controversial” (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?

I’m not sure what this question’s getting at. It seems to me that the only ‘controversial’ viewpoint an atheist could really hold (among an atheist community) is a belief in something irrational. I try not to hold such beliefs.

(I do maintain that the Earth is hollow and home to a superior race of lizard-like Supreme Overbeings, but that’s obviously a matter of fact, not an irrational claim).

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?

I don’t really do ‘favourites’, but Harris plays to my sensibilities best I guess. Dawkins is a little brash, if completely coherent, Dennett rather rarified, but indisputably eloquent, and Hitchens a little too ‘rock star’ but amusing and credible. Personally, I think we should try very hard not be divisive, but instead use our common strengths to allow us to put forward simple and effective arguments in favour of critical thinking.

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?

I don’t believe it would make a jot of difference to convince just one theistic person. Think about it: if The Pope renounced God tomorrow, they’d simply replace him, no matter what his reasons or how good an argument he put up. Single people do not make religions. Religions are created by a mass need for belonging. We have to supplant ‘religion’ as the fulfillment of that need with a stronger and greater respect for Humanity on its own terms. We need to outgrow superstition and look squarely into the face of truth. It’s a frightening prospect to embrace. I should know – I did it and it scared the crap out of me, and still does.

But one thing it didn’t do is turn me into an axe-wielding hedonistic anarchistic psychopath with loose morals, bankrupt ethics and a coke habit.

I was already one of those.

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So there you have it. I’m not going to tag anyone with this – if you feel like it would be helpful to wave the flag, feel free to have at it and let us know.

‡ (And Find Out Something You Didn’t Already Know In The Process)

We’ve played this game before, but it continues to amuse me. What do the following images have in common?

A picture of the great astronomical clock of Besançon.

A picture of Hampstead Heath.

A map showing the location of Weldon Spring Heights, Missouri.

A Picture of David Essex.

An odd sepia picture of a thin Santa.

That’s right – they are all pictures from the first page retrieved by Google Images on a search of the digits that make up my birthday. Try it – it’s fun! Go to Google Images and enter your birth date as six figures*: ddmmyy (or mmddyy if you are an illogical American). Pick any five pictures from the first page of results only. Then post them somewhere we can see! Hey. That sounds like a meme! Maybe I can start one. OK, I tag:

•Sara Sue
•jedimacfan
•Cissy Strutt
•Phoebe Fay
•Tequila Mockingbird

Post links back here in the Comments. Tag someone else and let’s see if we can start an internet phenomenon. Be sure to tell them that The Cow sent you!

Play if you want. It will affect the universe in no way if you don’t.†

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*Six figures seems, intriguingly, to be the optimum number to return the most unrelated bunches of images, but still get a reasonable number of hits. Fewer numbers result in too many images that are related in some way, and more numbers return a reduced field of possibilities. I’d love to know the maths behind this…

†Actually, it may affect the universe in profound ways. There is really no way of telling.

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Lolcats be afraid.

So Catalyst has tagged me with a Birthday Meme. He should really have known better.

Here are a few random examples of the kinds of things that have taken place on the date of my birthday, September 27:

•1590 – Pope Urban VII dies 13 days after being chosen as the Pope, making his reign the shortest papacy in history.

13 days! Talk about unlucky. That’s what happens if your workplace performance is poor and you have The Almighty as a boss.

•1822 – Jean-François Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta stone.

What he actually said was “These Egyptian scribblings are all Greek to me!” In a surprising stroke of good fortune everyone misunderstood what he meant.

•1886 – Mormon prophet John Taylor receives a controversial revelation on plural marriage that now divides factions of Mormonism.

Which illustrates just one of the many problems you might have if you run an institution under the auspices of Divine Revelation rather than commonsense.

•1928 – The Republic of China is recognized by the United States

Hey! Howdy! Nice to see you again. Now where was it..? oh I remember! That party thrown by Russia last month! You’re lookin’ pretty good!

•1968 – The stage musical Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, where it played 1,998 performances until its closure was forced by the roof’s collapsing in July 1973.

Which may mark one of the few times in theatrical history when a show was cancelled because it brought the house down.

•1979 – The United States Department of Education receives final approval from the U.S. Congress to become the 13th US Cabinet agency.

My God! They have education in America?

Overall, September 27 is not a very auspicious date, if Wikipedia is anything to go by. My tip is: don’t travel on this day, especially in a boat. Even if it does happen to be World Tourism Day.

I share this birthday with the following personages: Gwyneth Paltrow, Meat Loaf, The Baron Lothar von Richtofen (The Red Baron), Alvin Stardust and Avril Lavigne. Lawks. Aside from The Baron, they’re a dreary lot.

People who chose to pop their clogs on this day include: The aforementioned Pope Urban VII, Edgar Degas, Clara Bow and Donald O’Connor.

This coming September 27 will mark my half-century. I’m having a BIG party. You’re all invited.

A friend of mine told me the other day that secondhand copies of The Da Vinci Code are now so numerous that charities are refusing to take them any more. This led me to wonder to what kinds of uses we might put the ever-increasing tonnage of this dreary piece of literary ephemera as it reaches the end of its far-too-extended lifespan.

Here are some possibilities that occurred to me. Further suggestions welcome:

⊕ Send them back to Dan Brown so that he might comprehend the true magnitude of the hell he has wrought upon the rest of us.

⊕ Build a new World Trade Center out of them, because, should it be bombed by terrorists again, who would care?

⊕ Save them to build levees against rising sea levels (caused by global warming, caused by lack of trees, caused by manufacture of copies of The Da Vinci Code…)

⊕ Send them to prisons and make inmates read them if solitary confinement doesn’t work.

⊕ Build churches out of them.*

⊕ Use them to lure termites away from endangered wooden buildings.

⊕ Build a huge Wickerman-style structure out of them, imprison Dan Brown inside and burn it.

OK, over to you guys.

*’Cause that would piss a lot of people off.