There are in the world some truly detestable human beings, and Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas is one of them. This poisonous hate-filled individual is about as repugnant as anyone living on this planet can possibly be. His peculiar Fascist-Calvinist view of Christianity holds that Christ died so that only a few ‘elect’ people will be ‘saved’ and believes he is one of the elite on Earth who is worthy of God’s Grace. You decide what kind of a God might want to claim this man:
That’s one seething humanity-loathing mess of a person. That’s a man who has hate infused so thoroughly in his being that I doubt he can experience much else. I imagine that being inside his head is like living in a perpetually mouldy rat-infested sewer. How does someone get to be like this? More to the point, how does a person like that get through their obviously misery-saturated day? If ever I need to remind myself how much I love life, living, my friends, my family and this wonderful experience of EVERYTHING around me, I think I need only watch that video again.
You’ve been reading Tetherd Cow Ahead: proudly brought to you from the Land of the Sodomite Damned.
This is a Canon iP4600. To some, it might look like a printer but it is in fact a demon sent to Earth by Satan. Its very purpose on this mortal plane is to torment the souls of its victims until they lose all sanity and can be thus claimed by the Evil One as his own.
I have come to this conclusion because whenever I try to actually use the iP4600 for the purpose for which it is supposedly ‘designed’, ie, ‘printing’, it attempts to do anything but. It behaves wilfully – malignantly, even – and finds all kinds of ways to inflict misery upon me. It even communicates with me via strange taunting messages.
I attempt to print a photo and it replies:
Which it does. And then stops. And then does it again. Then, grudgingly it spits out a mangled copy of my picture:
Sometimes I set it running and go off to make a cup of tea, thinking that when I get back in ten minutes it will have finished. Instead:
This morning it decided, for no apparent reason, to glob ink all over some CD artwork.
And it is entirely futile to try and just ‘print off a quick document’…
It will behave for an entire day, and then, just as I’m trying to finish up and go off to dinner…
Pray for me, Acowlytes. I feel my soul slipping into its icy mechanical maw.
A life-size robotic girlfriend complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin was introduced to adoring fans at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas on Saturday. Roxxxy the sex robot had a coming-out party in Sin City at the weekend.
And doesn’t she look like the kind of gal you’d be proud to take home to mum? I have this horrific feeling she speaks with the insipid sing-song voice of the Telstra robot:
In just a few words, tell me what it is that you would like to do. Was that ‘clean the wainscoting? I’m sorry, I’m having trouble understanding you. Would you like to speak to a customer service representative?’
Roxxxy’s creator, Douglas Hines, of the company TrueCompanion, pictured above in what must be one of the creepiest images ever to grace The Melbourne Age, says of the “anatomically correct robot”(i):
“She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook, but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean(ii).”
Yes, I think we do know what you mean, Doug. You mean that of the three priorities one must have in a female friend – cooking, cleaning and screwing – she is good for one of them. If only you can perfect the other two, you’ll be raking in money faster than Roxxxy can gyrate her servo-mechanisms.
”She knows exactly what you like,” says Hines. ”If you like Porsches, she likes Porsches. If you like soccer, she likes soccer.” Roxxxy can chat with her flesh-and-blood mate, and touching her elicits a variety of comments.
I so want to be there to watch the reaction when the first customer takes one of these out of the box on Christmas morning.
Why do they always emphasise that these monstrosities are ‘anatomically correct’ when what they mean is that it has tits and orifices? As far as I can tell by the picture above, it’s anatomically a mutant – look at the hands! Look at the weird mouth! Anatomically correct? Sure if your template is the Bride of Wildenstein [↩]
Is anyone else getting a sort of porno Monty Python vibe here? [↩]
While in my local video store a few days back, in a rare moment of consumer weakness * I succumbed to a ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ offer and picked up a DVD compilation of all the episodes and the ‘movie’ of the 80s science fiction tele-epic V.
It didn’t seem like such a bad deal really – Violet Towne and I both had fond memories of V. You remember the schtick I’m sure: huge alien space ships the size of Donald Trump’s ego appear rather abruptly over a good number of the world’s major cities and hover there j-u-u-u-s-t long enough to give everybody the heebie jeebies. It turns out that the wait is merely due to the alien leader putting on her face. The doomsaying of a few negative Earthling Cassandras is, it appears, just overactive xenophobia. Shucks – the alien ‘Visitors’ are a jolly happy lot who want nothing more than to lend a helping hand to the struggling new kids on the intergalactic block. And to eat all our hamsters, steal our water and suck out our brains – but it’s not like anyone could have seen something like that coming, right?
Sure, there were a few troubling indicators, if you knew where to look: the aliens’ appalling dress sense (well, it was the 80s, so it’s not like they stood out that much), their insistence on wearing sunglasses indoors (that didn’t start happening for Earthlings until the 90s, so I guess that was a demonstration of the visitors’ advanced culture) and their habit of snacking on mice out of dumpsters (but hey – if you’re discreet…). Oh, and if you happened to tear their skin off, there was a surprise lizard underneath.†
In any event, it didn’t take VT and I long to realise that our fond memories of V had taken on the rosy glow that only nostalgia can lend. The series (which David Icke probably thought was a documentary), was, in fact, pretty damn awful. The general structure of the thing certainly did have potential (ham-fisted Third Reich analogs notwithstanding) and the feeling of distrust and helplessness in the face of an implacable adversary is an idea that has a lot going for it. Our twenty-something selves evidently saw past the frightful soap-quality acting and into something of the concept’s promise – over the years our memories have thankfully expunged much of the dreadful dialogue and appalling plot contrivances.
Last night we got to the end of Series 2, in which, overcoming the sobering improbabilities of mammalian and reptilian genetic structures being anywhere near compatible, one of the cast gives birth to alien twins, the arrival of the second of which was undoubtedly supposed to instill terror in the viewing audience. But when the little toothy green reptile muppet ‘baby’ lunged ‘menacingly’ toward the camera (several times for good measure) Violet Towne and I simultaneously shrieked in unison, snorted our pinot through our noses and fell on the floor laughing. How did we ever accept such abominable bathos? I mean it’s not as if there wasn’t any better precedent – V post-dates Ridley Scott’s impeccable (and still mightily effective) Alien by a full 5 years! I guess we were just a lot better at the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in those halcyon days (and it was television – which in those times was in most cases notably inferior to anything you could see on the big screen).
At several times during our V marathon, VT and I remarked that it was surprising that no-one had attempted a remake of the concept, and, of course, teh internets piped up to let us know that someone is doing just that. It will no doubt thrill all you V aficionados down to your little webbed toes (and have David Icke struggling even harder in his straight jacket) to know that ABC is airing a new series of V this November. And the subset of those devotees who are also fans of Joss Wheedon’s lamentably short-lived Firefly will be doubly chuffed to learn that the Visitor leader is being played by Morena Baccarin – a woman so impossibly beautiful that apparently she can only get roles that require an impossibly beautiful woman who is really a lizard (well, seriously – after a smashing debut in Firefly, she fairly disappeared without a trace. WTF?) Alan Tudyk (Firefly‘s ‘Wash’) also has a major role in the new V‡
I think we can assume that ABC is attempting a Battlestar Galactic-style remake of V, which, all things considered, could be kinda fun. At least we can expect the acting to be better, and hopefully something a little less lumpen in the way of allegory and story.
I have to confess, though, Faithful Acowlytes, that these musings have become something of a digression from my original purpose for this post – I meant to use my examination of the colourful antics of V to illuminate an entirely different matter involving aliens and earthlings. As this post has already become rather lengthy, I’ll forbear for now. But stay tuned for Part 2, in which we’ll ask some serious questions about alien/human interaction. And no, it doesn’t involve kinky lizard porn.
*I’m not much of a ‘bargain’ shopper – I figure that bargain is just retail code for “We’ve got too many of these bloody things Hank – see what you can do to free up some shelf space…”
†In what must be one of the cheapest budget decisions made for a science fiction movie EVER, the Visitors never appeared as their lizard selves. Never. Not once. They goose-stepped around earth in their orange-uniformed monkey-suits, procreated with Earth women without giving anything away (now that must have been interesting) and relaxed in the privacy of their own off-Earth ships in their stretchy homo-prostheses. No alien in the history of science fiction has shown such dedication to keeping incognito!
‡One is inclined to speculate that people at ABC actually watched Firefly (unlike anyone at Fox, evidently) and knew a good thing when they saw it…
…today at 11.15 am. So yes, someone is still buying it. Scary, huh?
It was flanked on one side by Bovril (an equally disgusting beverage) and on the other by chicken stock. Oddly, it was many aisles removed from the coffee and tea.
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…†
† 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.
