Tetherd Cow Ahead

You’re probably aware that Google has just launched their ‘predictive’ search engine Google Instant – a web version of the kind of ‘pre’ search which has already made its way into many desktop and phone apps. It’s actually pretty impressive. Not really the kind of news I care about airing here on The Cow, but the reason I bring it up is as a result of this quote, made by Google VP (the usually sensible) Marissa Mayer at the press launch in San Francisco:⁽ⁱ⁾

We are actually predicting what query you are likely to do and giving you results for that. There is actually a psychic element to it.

No there is not, Marissa. There is actually no psychic element to it. It’s a technological element. PLEASE. The loonies don’t need any more encouragement.

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Footnotes:

1. She also used the vacuous phrase ‘It’s a quantum leap forward…’ [↩]

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While we’re on the subject of television, in the last couple of weeks I’ve also caught a few episodes of a show called ‘Criss Angel: Mindfreak’ playing on A&E. Now, for anyone who doesn’t know, Criss Angel is an illusionist in the tradition of David Copperfield, Doug Henning, Chung Ling Soo (William Robinson) and Harry Houdini. That is, a Grand Illusionist. He does the kind of BIG magic that requires a stage crew of a few dozen people, a room at a venue in Las Vegas and (in case you haven’t inferred it) money.

Criss Angel’s schtick is to attempt shake off the stuffiness and shmaltz of his tuxedoed predecessors and instill into his act a semblance of anarchistic punk,⁽ⁱ⁾ but it is, the leather and the chains and the bandana notwithstanding, exactly the same kind of spectacular theatrical routine that has defined stage magic for the best part of a century. You know the sort of thing: cut a girl in half with a circular saw/escape from a locked box dangling over a precipice/make people disappear.

I want to say from the outset that Criss Angel is VERY good at what he does. And what he does, in exact terms, is to make people believe things that seem contrary to the laws of reality. The key words here are ‘believe’ and ‘seem’.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

Watching his show is a revealing exercise in how the impressionable mind works, and an excellent disciplinary pastime for the rational thinker.

Now I don’t know how Criss Angel accomplishes many of his illusions. I’d be disappointed if I did, because I really like good stage illusionists and I expect them to be able to outwit me if they’re worth their paycheck. But there’s one thing I can tell you for sure: Criss Angel, when performing his act – despite his frequent declarations to the contrary – does not care too much about telling ‘the truth’.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ And neither do his stage crew or his film crew. What you see on Mindfreak is rarely what you have been told you’re seeing.^(iv)

Here’s an example: Criss appears outside his permanent ‘magic’ home at the Luxor in Las Vegas, with a crowd of ‘random’ bystanders. He reaches into a bush and introduces them to a ‘pet’ that the management of the Luxor won’t let him keep in the hotel: a large scorpion. It’s a real live scorpion for sure – there’s no doubt about that. The onlookers ook and gasp as he lets it crawl over his hands, and then, with a nice piece of sleight-of-hand, magics it away in a puff of smoke. But the real trick is yet to come. Angel reaches over and grabs an attractive (of course) girl from the crowd and gives her a big kiss, whereupon she mugs wide-eyed and ‘surprised’ and opens her mouth to reveal the scorpion crawling out.

This is one of the the oldest and most frequently-employed gambits in the book of magic – the girl, despite her convincing acting, is indisputably an accomplice. There is simply no other way to achieve a illusion like this. You can’t get a seven-inch-long scorpion into an unsuspecting girl’s mouth without her consent. I know – I’ve tried.^(v) Seriously – this is the only way this trick can work, and even though no-one wants to believe it, magicians make frequent use of accomplices.^(vi)

Now I don’t want to seem like I’m making light of Mr Angel’s accomplishments as an entertainer. As I said, he’s good at what he does. Many of his tricks (especially the smaller ones) are quite astonishing.^(vii) But when Criss Angel ranges through the adoring crowd after setting the scene for his next conjuration and proclaims that there’s ‘NO BULLSHIT!’ there’s one thing that’s for certain – the greatest piece of magic in his entire repertoire is his ability to convince his audience that that statement is true.

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Footnotes:

1. Indeed, his logo is the anarchist ‘A’ in a circle, with a kind of Nike-slash flourish. [↩]
2. Criss Angel’s Las Vegas show is, in fact, called ‘Believe’. The word, etched in twenty foot high letters on billboards across the city, seems more like a brute-force brainwashing command than an advertisment. [↩]
3. Just like Britain’s Derren Brown who uses any method available to swindle his audience. [↩]
4. I need to point out here that this is not surprising – stage illusionists excel in leading you to believe things that aren’t true. It is, after all, their job. Criss Angel takes things one step further by exploiting the ‘natural’ trust that people have when they see something on television. For some reason it doesn’t occur to most people that a magician on tv would use the medium itself to trick them. Think again folks! [↩]
5. That’s a joke. [↩]
6. If you still don’t believe me, watch the video very carefully – despite what Mr Angel wants you to think, there is no way he passed the scorpion from his mouth to the girl’s mouth with that surprisingly chaste ‘stage’ kiss. His ‘mouth acting’ of regurgitating the scorpion is, of course, purely a distraction. Therefore there are really only two possibilities: the scorpion got into the girl’s mouth via real magic, or, when the camera wasn’t on her, and when the crowd was totally engrossed with Angel making the first scorpion disappear, the girl was surreptitiously stuffing a second scorpion into her gob. You decide which of those two scenarios seems most plausible… [↩]
7. Even if quite a few of them have a pedigree stretching back a good many decades. [↩]

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The internet is over.

Yes, dear friends, you are all living in denial. According to the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince, and now known as Prince once more, the internet is just ‘a hip fad like MTV’ and is now outdated.

And running with his new-found insight, Prince is breaking all the boundaries and taking the extraordinary steps of releasing his new music album only as a CD! Genius. He’s chosen to do this through the innovative new distribution conduit of the newspaper! What a visionary!!

Cowpokes! The End is Nigh! Run for the hills! What with the threats of terrorism, biological warfare, solar flares, tsunamis, the flipping of the magnetic poles, an atheist woman as head of the Australian government and a black man as the head of the US government, it will be a MIRACLE if we last even another week! But, dear feiends, have no fear! Should one (or more!) of the aforementioned catastrophes overtake us, the folks over at Vivos have anticipated every eventuality for the approaching apocalypse and are offering the ultimate ‘life assurance’ and ‘the greatest chance of future restoration of the world as we know it, regardless of the catastrophe’.

Here – let them tell you about it in their own words:

Millions of people believe that we are living in the “end times”. Many are looking for a viable solution to survive potential future Earth devastating events. Eventually, our planet will realize another devastating catastrophe, whether manmade, or a cyclical force of nature. Disasters are rare and unexpected, but on any sort of long timeline, they’re inevitable. It’s time to prepare!

Vivos is a privately funded venture, with no religious affiliations, building a global network of underground shelters, to accommodate thousands of people. Vivos will provide a life assurance solution for those that wish to be prepared to survive these potential events, whether they occur now, in 2012, or in decades to come

Yes, by purchasing a share in a Vivos community bunker, or getting them to build your own bespoke shelter, you can survive the End Times and walk out refreshed into a world full of bracing post-catastrophe horror! To see what you’ll get for your money, you can take a tour around a typical Vivos facility, furnished with all the comforts of home, including attractive paintings of idyllic landscapes that you’ll never see again:

Geez guys, could you have found a more gloomy and depressing piece of music for that? Are you selling a shelter or a tomb here?

Seriously, no matter how hard I try, I can’t think of any calamity listed on the Vivos site that seems worse than ending up in some underground IKEA nightmare with a bunch of people who are inclined to believe that the world is going to end in 2012 ‘because the Mayan calendar says so’.⁽ⁱ⁾ Let me see: Electromagnetic Pulse? Nope. Killer comet? Nope. Planet X? Nope. Super volcano? Nope.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ I’d rather take my chances with any of those.

What are these people thinking? Have they never seen a post-apocalyptic movie? Have they never played Fallout? Do they really want to climb out of their bunkers after a year of mind-numbing boredom to find themselves wandering around a planet full of shotgun-wielding mutant vigilantes with no morals and bad personal hygiene? Or worse, Fundamental Islamic militia?

There are so many things wrong with this unhinged doom-laden vision that it’s hard to know where to start. From the hysterical countdown to annihilation (905 days, 06 hours, 31 minutes, 24 seconds remaining) to the hyper-paranoid ‘scenarios’ videos (Nuclear Terrorism! Surviving Anarchy! Secret Government Shelters!) the website plays out like some bad Hollywood projection of the Apocalypse. It takes mere seconds to find places where this plan will start splitting at the seams.

Take a quick tour around the Vivos Knowledge Base and see how many opportunities for failure you can find. The spectacular promises (hydroponic gardens to support 200 people for more than a year, 24 hour power generation with supplemental wind and solar, hotel-style amenities, impregnable defences to resist volcanic eruption, seismic disturbance and biological contamination) fairly reek of hyperbole.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ Half these things are all but impossible to achieve. And if Vivos doesn’t deliver, what are you going to do when the anarchist Muslim terrorist bio-freaks come pouring through your Vivos shelter airlock? Ask for your money back?

Tetherd Cow Advice: If you’re worried about the Apocalypse arriving in 2012,^(iv) stock up on single malt whisky and plan to be somewhere with a good view. In the meantime, send me your bank account details. After all, you can’t take it with you.

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Big thanks to Atlas for bringing Vivos to my attention.

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Footnotes:

1. You can watch a video on the Vivos site about how the ‘incredibly precise’ Mayan calendar (‘… a calendar more accurate even than our own’) predicts the world will end in 2012. [↩]
2. I’m a little surprised to see that Zombie Attack and Alien Invasion aren’t featured, to be honest. If nothing else, they’d make for some really cool additional icons. [↩]
3. For a start – where are they getting their air from? Filtered air from outside will be useless in a case of chemical attack, and it’s not like they can stockpile a year’s worth of oxygen for 200 people… [↩]
4. You can bet your Nigerian fortune that I’ll be revisiting all these predictions in 2013! [↩]

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Has anyone else noticed the creeping rise of what I call the ‘I’ll Call You Back Problem’? It works like this: you go to have some kind of service performed – in my case this week, a tyre repaired on my car – and the person in charge says ‘Yep, righty-ho! We’ll have the spare-part in/forms completed/appointment time arranged ASAP and we’ll call you back!’

And you wait. And wait. And wait. Days go by. Months. even.

And eventually you call them.

‘Oh yes! No problems! The spare-part’s in/forms are completed/appointment is for next Tuesday at 2pm!’

But they didn’t call me back.

I’ve taken to asking ‘Now, you really will call me back, right?’, but don’t even bother – despite all assurances you might get, this doesn’t work either.

The very worst culprit, unsurprisingly, is Telstra. As an experiment, I’ve decide to wait for a call I was promised in January.⁽ⁱ⁾ I’m still waiting. In a year I’m going to call them and ask why they didn’t call me back. I’m sure you’re as curious as I am to hear their response.

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Footnotes:

1. relating to a non-critical matter, you’ll be relieved to know [↩]

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Every now and then out of curiosity I check the server statistics for Tetherd Cow to see who visits, from where, and what they’re interested in. Mostly it’s boring. Occasionally it’s baffling. This is one of those times. I mean, veronica, rasputin and shoo tag scam, sure no problem. Famous mirrors, yup. Old ‘adds’ – I guess.

But fanny as the number one term? Really? Just go over to the side bar search button, Acowlytes, and do a search for fanny. You get one hit – this post. And yet the number one search term bringing people to Tetherd Cow Ahead this last month, with 71 requests, is fanny. What the crap is that about?

And as for girl sucks cow singsong…

The day before yesterday, Cow Central was besieged by enormous thunderstorms that lasted several hours throughout the afternoon. It was spectacular and scary. I had the great idea of attempting to record the thunder – it was the best rolling, echoing thunder I’ve heard in a long time. As I set my machine into record a phenomenal tearing shriek of thunder made me jump about three feet off the ground and sent The Spawn scurrying under the house. Here’s what it sounded like:

Download KABOOM!

- only a million times louder. Whatever did that, also knocked out the power to my house and brought down my internet. My net connection is not managed by the dreaded and appalling Telstra, but instead by Optus, another of our laughable telcos. I don’t have cause to ring Optus much – generally our net connection stays up – but since I was still completely cut off from the world when I woke up yesterday morning, I picked up the phone…

Oh crap. Now they have a robot too. It’s a little more brusque than the Telstra one, and a little less obsequious, but it’s still STUPID. But not as stupid as the real life operators, it seems, when I finally got through to one…

ME: Hello – my internet connection went down in the big storms yesterday and I was wondering if you could give me some idea when it will be up again.

CANDY:⁽ⁱ⁾ OK. Where are you situated (I tell her). OK. I’ll check for you.

…tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking and wh…

CANDY: It looks like all the connections down there are affected by the storms.

ME: Yes I know that.

CANDY: On your modem, can you see a flashing light?

ME: Yes. There’s a line error.

CANDY: But is it an orange flashing light?

ME: Yes. Well, it’s green on my modem, but yes, it tells me the line is out.

CANDY: Well that orange flashing light is the reason you don’t have internet.

ME: No, Candy, surely the reason I don’t have internet is that the line is down because of the storms. The flashing light is just an LED that tells me what’s going on.

CANDY: …bzzz..t..bz..tsszz….bzzzz… (I swear I could hear her brain making that kind of noise) Well, it looks like there are problems with the internet because of the big storms down there.

ME (wondering if garrotting is still a popular form of murder): Right. So, can you give me any kind of idea when the problem will be fixed?

CANDY: No, I’m sorry. When the orange light stops flashing the problem will be fixed and your internet will be working again.

Two Hours Pass.

I call again. This time the robot is unable to parse my sentence. When I try and explain that I want to talk about an internet outage, the machine doesn’t ‘understand’ me and goes through the process of trying a bunch of alternatives. It’s like playing a guessing game with a monkey. No, scratch that. It’s like playing guessing games with a lobotomized monkey.

After it finds that it can’t guess what I want, it says ‘Hmmm. I’m not understanding you.’ Jesus fucking Christ. ‘Hmmm.’??? Someone has programmed the damn thing with attitude!

I really hope they’ll eventually give it a nose, so I can punch it.

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Footnotes:

1. Her real name. Or at least the one she told me [↩]

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When I’m writing on my computer, I have one of those widgets that I can pop down which lets me look up a word in Apple’s system dictionary or thesaurus. It’s very useful, if a little less comprehensive than the Oxford English Dictionary or Roget’s Thesaurus both of which I prefer (I wish there was an Oxford widget and a Roget’s widget, but sadly making one for the Mac doesn’t seem a desirable pursuit for either of those two institutions). Anyways, needs must when the Devil drives, so the other day, having cause to use the thesaurus, I typed in the word ‘delicious’ and was amused to see:

Hahahahaha! Wiley ol’ Ezio doesn’t miss a trick does he? Talk about innovative product placement!

As for the secondary meaning – Ezio always was one for the ladies, and it’s surely no surprise to anyone that his sausage is responsible for their delicious languor.⁽ⁱ⁾




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Footnotes:

1. ‘Languor’ – what a beautiful word! And notice how the ‘u’ precedes the ‘o’, defying the pattern of mostly every other English word that ends in with that combination of letters! [↩]

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Ave, Faithful Acowlytes! That’s ‘ave’ as in ‘Ave Maria!’ – for this morning I bring you a touching moral tale of wondrous miracles and things that seem so unbelievable that, well, you’ll have trouble believing them!

Our story starts some time ago in the house of George and Lina Tannous, in the little suburb of Guildford in Sydney, Australia. Very sadly for George and Lina, their son Mike was killed in a car accident in September of 2006. It must have been a terrible loss and I sincerely feel for them.

Here’s a picture of George holding a picture of Mike:

And this is where our story turns from one of human compassion, into full blown woo-woo of the highest order. See those trickles on the wall next to George? It’s not the result of bad caulking. Not long after Mike’s death, those oily trails began appearing on the walls of the Tannous’ Guildford home as if by magic. That, my friends, is a miracle in action! Yes, if you believe George and Lina Tannous, it would appear that Almighty God, Creator of the Universe, has chosen to make his presence felt to all of humanity by manifesting as trickles of oil on the wall of a house in a nondescript Sydney suburb!

Mr Tannous told The Daily Telegraph:

“My wife saw something shining on the wall like a diamond over Mike’s bed. Only my wife saw it and there were 15 of us in the room with her. She touched it and all of a sudden oil started appearing on the walls and it hasn’t stopped. This is a big miracle. I can’t explain it.”

The Lord be Praised! And what does the Church have to say about all this?

“I’ve been there many times and we cannot pinpoint exactly what’s happening. It is miraculous.”

…opined Archbishop Paul Saliba, the head of the Australian Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese.

A local Catholic priest, Fr Michael Melhen, said that while he cannot speak on behalf of the Catholic church, as an individual believer, he is stunned at what he has seen:

“The purpose of the oil, according to the church, is to bless people and that’s a sign, a symbolism of peace.”⁽ⁱ⁾.

Meanwhile, University of Western Sydney expert on the psychology of the paranormal and supernatural, Dr Tony Jinks told the Parramatta Sun that:

“There is a deeper story here than whether its true or a hoax. I’ve seen a lot of things to make me very wary of saying that there’s nothing to it.”

Woooo-eeee-ooooo!

What is really depressing with this whole matter is the wide-eyed credulity with which the news media has been reporting it. Aside from one article which included a frumpy throwaway sound bite from a token skeptic, any search I made on ‘Guildford Miracle House’ returned a frothy spew of gullible drivel that would hardly have passed muster in kid’s book of fairy tales. It hasn’t, of course, deterred legions of The Faithful from visiting the house, which is kept open during the day for such pilgrimages.

But pushing on, let us consider all of the above in the light of some recently unfolding news about Mr George Tannous. Last week Mr Tannous was charged with credit card fraud – specifically with falsifying documents to allow people with poor credit histories to obtain credit cards. Police allege that for his efforts, Mr Tannous received remuneration from his clients. Mr Tannous claims that he is not guilty of the charges. He told The Sydney Morning Herald in a statement that:

”There is a big game [being played] by those who are against this miracle and the House of Miracles. The miracle is completely true and it’s clear from the result of the oil which was tested by the scientists from the Government.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ If somebody has a problem with my job, let him take me to court. The miracle will continue always and the door is always open.”

Yes, George, of course there is a big game being played to discredit your unlikely miracle. That’s got to be it! It’s not like you’d do anything wrong in the eyes of God, would you?⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

I feel it is important to note that Mr Tannous has not actually been charged with fraud at this time, and, under our justice system, he therefore remains an innocent man until such charges are upheld. But I can’t help wondering what Archbishop Saba, Fr Melhen and Tony Jinks would have to say about the miracle in his house if we were to ask them today…

I suspect there’d be a lot of ‘No comment’ going down.

(Be sure and leave your own view in the TCA Poll!)

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Footnotes:

1. In spite of his disclaimer, he apparently IS speaking on behalf of the Church [↩]
2. Despite other claims of ‘extensive scientific testing’ of the oil, I could find no evidence of such a thing ever having happened. There are certainly no results published anywhere on the web, which seems curious at the very least for such an earth-shattering event [↩]
3. Where does anyone get this bereft-of-all-evidence idea that having religion in your life gives you any kind of moral superiority? [↩]

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This was a Christmas present for me from Viridian. Do you think my stepdaughters know me well?

And with a bumper sticker like that, well, how could you be anything but the coolest dude in town?