Tetherd Cow Ahead

The Continuing Misfortunes of Simple Graphics Man ~

#26: The Worrisome Weapon.

SGM has no sooner recovered from The Phantasmagorical Phenomenon than he is tempted to activate a conveniently located Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator. Or something. I mean, who has a clue what that thing is? And yet, SGM steps right up and sticks his hand in it.

Way to go SGM!

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Photographed by Pil, our special SGM Correspondent.

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a·nal·o·gy [uh-nal-uh-jee] –noun (plural analo-gies)

1. A similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based.

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Definition courtesy Dictionary.com

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Tonight all sensible Australians cry tears of joy! The Weasel is no more! Begone you horrid little man, and let us attempt to repair the damage you have done.

Americans – take a leaf. You know what you have to do.

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I’ve just encountered ‘the world’s first interactive natural spring water – H²Om Water with Intention‘ Yes, you heard right: H²Om, as in Ommmmmmmm…

You can visit the website if you’ve got the stomach, but I’ll save you the pain: these people are selling bottled water that has been infused with nothing other than (supposedly) positive energy. From their blurb:

H²Om water with intention has revolutionized the bottled water industry by creating the world’s first vibrationally charged, interactive bottled water.

Got that? The water is vibrationally charged. And, to reiterate, it’s also interactive. If your Bullshit Detector Meters haven’t pinned yet, allow me to elaborate: the concept behind this water appears to be that those who drink it think about positive things while they are doing so, and then this somehow makes the water better. It’s not explained exactly how this works, nor in exactly what way the water is better. It’s just better.

The H²Om people have trademarked the slogan Think It While You Drink It™ a catchphrase that simultaneously illuminates the stupidity of the Trademarking system and the brainlessness of anyone who believes that a witless motto such as this actually means anything.

H²Om’s Vibration Hydration™ (Oh Spare Me!™) comes in seven great vibrational ‘flavours’: Love, Perfect Health, Gratitude, Prosperity, Will Power, Joy and Peace (I swear I’m not making this up).

Now I want to emphasize here, in case you didn’t get it, that these ‘flavours’ aren’t actually anything, like, flavoursome. If you buy a bottle of, say, ‘Joy’, it’s going to taste exactly the same as ‘Prosperity’- it’s only the vibrations that will be different (shit, I’m laughing as I type this – it’s so much like a parody I can’t actually believe that these people are serious).

Best of all, if this water doesn’t unequivocally bring you Peace/Joy/Love/Pretzels, H²Om have the ultimate escape clause: the water is interactive you loser – if it’s not working it’s your fault!

Still not with me? Still giving them the benefit of the doubt? Not laughing as much as me yet? Then read on:

As an added bonus, once our water is in the bottle, we play a restorative compositions of music, frequencies, and spoken word to the water.

Spoken word? Wha?

Nice water. Nice joyful pretty water. I love you water. You are the best water in the universe. Pretty pretty water. Lovely watery joyful prosperous water.

Seriously. It’s going to be something just like that, right?

Yup. If there’s one thing this website doesn’t lack it’s pages of incomprehensible waffle:

There are several distinctive vibrational frequencies that are infused in each bottle of H2Om. The First is the vibrational frequency of the label. The use of words, symbols and colors on the label. Each bottle contains the symbol of the Absolute “Om”. It also contains the vibratory word “Love” or “Perfect Health” etc. written on the label in many of the world’s languages. A specific color vibration has also been chosen for each bottle, this color coordinates with the corresponding chakra.

Now I know what you’re going to say – this is all flimsy bollocks and no-one is going to fall for this claptrap without some kind of basis in fact! Well, it’s just about now that H²Om wheels out its supporting ‘evidence’ for their miraculous product, and it comes in the form of an endorsement from a personage who was slated to appear in a future edition of the TCA Educational Series ‘Woo Woo Beliefs‘, a minimally educated Japanese ‘doctor’* Masaru Emoto. Some of you may have seen Dr Emoto’s claims promoted in the risible What the Bleep do We Know, a film that is rooted in reality to about the same extent as, oh, your average Warner Brothers’ Roadrunner cartoon.

To encapsulate, Dr Emoto has formulated some ideas (it’s absurd to call them hypotheses, since he doesn’t even pretend to adopt any form of scientific protocol) that water crystallizes in certain ways according to its response to people’s thoughts and emotions. That’s all you need to know – I’ll examine Dr Emoto further at a later time. It is sufficient to note that the H²Om people are so besotted by Dr Emoto that they have made him a partner in their company and are in the process of launching a new line with his imprimatur.

And you know what? I just bet they have the box-office attendance figures for What the Bleep framed on the H²Om office wall, with all the zeros emphasized in fluorescent hi-lighter.

Given the size of that demographic, it’s evident that H²Om’s marketing is dead accurate in one respect anyway: it is very obviously water with intention. Oh yeah. Intention of the people who make it to get filthy rich by exploiting the gullibility of simpletons.

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*His ‘doctorate’ in Alternative Medicine was awarded by an uncredited pay-your-way ‘university’ in India. Make of that what you will.

Thanks Sean for bringing the H²Om website to my attention.

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From time to time I get to musing on all manner of things here on The Cow, and today I bring you some thoughts about nature and self-similarity.

This morning at dawn I was lying half-awake listening to the song of a chirpy early-rising Turdus merula, better known as the Common Blackbird. The Blackbird was introduced to Australia, in Melbourne where I am now living, in the 1850s as part of the regrettable We-Wish-It-Was-More-Like-England makeover that the colonists were hell-bent on giving this completely un-Englandlike continent.

The Blackbird’s song is very pretty and very recognizable – listen to the end part of this sample:*

What I realized as I was listening though, was that the little guy† wasn’t just doing the same exact phrase over and over – there were little variations each and every time – just like he was improvising on his little blackbirdy theme. No two riffs were exactly alike.

This got me to speculating about another well-known natural phenomenon in which no two elements are exactly alike, but are very similar in structure and beauty and precision: the snowflake.

And so I began to wonder if the song of the Common Blackbird might in fact be the aural equivalent of the crystalline structure of the snowflake.‡

I don’t really know why I should have made that connection, but there you go. Put it down to my hypnopompic state if you like. But I leave you with this thought: self-similarity is rife in nature. It is embedded everywhere from the mathematics of fractals to the formation of snow crystals and the songs of birds. Its presence is felt in almost every natural process somehow or other. Think about it: it really does not need to be this way. All things considered, the natural world could be completely random. And yet order arises spontaneously everywhere it can.

The reasons for this remain a beautiful mystery.

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*This recording by Fred Van Gessel. I pinched it, so for my atonement I urge you to go buy his recording Bird Calls of the Greater Sydney Region from the Australian Museum Shop.

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‡ (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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Well, colour me impressed! I must admit, I had rather low expectations for the outcome of this particular mêlée but once again my loyal readers have dazzled me with their wit and their prowess in the literary arena. The task was to write a piece of Sildenafil Spam in the style of your favourite poet. The Cownoscenti rose to the challenge like they’d been popping the little blue numbers all night.

It was a tough call to sift out a winner.

Universal Head set the tone early by channelling Ted Hughes as his muse, and he held the field for quite a few days in front of a good many contenders. Jedimacfan completely missed the point and showed that he is probably already employed by could easily rival the spammers, with an effort that would undoubtedly cause Joyce Kilmer to writhe in horror. And later topped it with something even more gag-worthy. Cissy Strutt managed an awesomely impressive e. e. cummings-style creation and it has to be said that if spamming was around in his day and nominative determinism has anything in it, I’m sure cummings would have been right in the spammy fray.

Casey‘s muse, Thomas Spams Eliot, shows us why his initials anagrammatize handily into ‘toilets’ with some verse that doesn’t stray altogether too far from something the real T. S. might have penned. A very worthy effort in two parts, and very nearly the winner.

Sagacious Hillbilly managed to persuade Tennyson to ring in a whole cast of reprobates to dance a spammy jig and Tequila Mockingbird fired right back, but alas, The Reverend was quite unable to work out who she was riffing on. My bad, TMock!

A guest visit from Spam Ayres* cements her position as the person you’d most like to avoid at a party, and Phoebe Fay‘s re-interpretation of Ozymandias gives new meaning to the term ‘rock hard erection’.

But the person who I have chosen to be the Tetherd Cow Ahead Literary Ambassador to SpamCon 08† is…

Tastes Like Chicken!

Yes, TLC managed almost to reach the lofty heights of The Cow’s own Laureate Rupert Brookes’ wonderful creation, with a William Cullen Bryant-style ode that is at once tragic and hopeful. If ever there was a romantic paean to the powers of Viagra, this is it.

Tastes Like Chicken, The Cow Salutes you. I will need a mailing address where I can send you your prize. Write to me at [reverend-at-tetherdcow.com] with your PO Box or park bench number.

Thank you everyone! Once again, I doff my bone-clad top-hat to yez all!

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*US readers should probably go here to understand the humour in this. (The entry would have had a much greater chance of winning had it been an audio recording, btw)

†There is no such thing, alas. The reason for this is fairly obvious – if all the world’s spammers were to meet in one place at the same time, then I believe that not a single person on the entire planet would object to the deployment of a small nuclear device at that location.

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Spam Observations #45

Terrapraeta, longtime Cow reader and sometime commenter, earlier this week had a cheery howdy-doody from her new-found friend Rhonda K Lugo. With her well-honed Cow sensibilities, TP instantly knew I would need to bring Rhonda’s musings to the attention of the Cownoscenti.

Those of you with keen memories will recall that a little while back I suggested to Fabron Jenkins and his spammy pals that their ham-fisted wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach could do with some re-imagining (as they like to say in the ad business) and that they therefore might like to consider waxing a little more poetic with their paeans to Sildenafil.

Sure enough, with the sophistication of Keats and Brooke and the subtlety of Yeats and Eliot, Rhonda K is first out of the starting gates:

Now that you’ve got a girl that’s hot
You wanna screw her juicy twat.
She’s full of passion, she’s so nice!
But would your penile size suffice?
Not sure she will long for more?
You need a wang she would adore!
But how to raise it long and thick?
Your only hope is MegaDik!
You’ll get so wanted super-size
And see wild craving in her eyes!
Your rod will stuff her poon so deep,
Tonight you’ll hardly fall asleep!

Ah, the passion! The yearning! The verve! The style! Not quite how Rupert would have put it, fair enough, but hey, at least Rhonda’s giving it a go!

So. You all know what the The Reverend does when he sees that the ante is desirous of upping – yes, that’s right, he holds a competition!

Namely: Write a piece of spam in the style of your favourite poet.

Now pay careful attention to The Rules:

• Your favourite poet may not be yourself.

• Your favourite poet may not be Joey Polanski.

• Your favourite poet may not be Rhonda K Lugo.

• NO references to Rasputin. Save that for January 1.

OK. Have at it Acowlytes. There will be a prize. If Joey wins he can nominate to whom his prize is delivered.

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #3

This is Raël. Raël believes* that he is the prophetic ambassador on Earth for The Elohim, a race of superhuman beings that created all life on our planet.

In 1973 Raël was a racing car driver called Claude Vorilhon. It so happened that while Claude was visiting a secluded area of the French countryside, a member of The Elohim appeared in a silvery saucer-shaped space-ship to give him a message to pass on to all humankind. After this, he evidently felt compelled to change his name (well, fair enough I guess – Claude is a somewhat underwhelming name for a cult leader†) and run up a huge account with Persil.

Now, see, this is where those aliens of superior intellect always seem to go tragically wrong. Out of all the effective methods they could conceivably adopt to get their message across, they invariably choose to use as their mouthpiece someone like a racing car driver with eccentric dress sense.

We can only speculate that the process that takes place in Elohim Central every time they turn their attention our way goes something like this:

Elohim Subordinate: Oh Noble and Thrice-Blesséd Grand Master Elohim! We desperately need to save Humankind! Despite all our efforts so far, they continue to ignore our message! What should we do?

Grand Master Elohim: Fellow Elohim! Land your Glorious Silvery Saucer in a hidden field in France! Wait, then, for a deceitful man of questionable intelligence to come by, and impart the Galactic Wisdom to him. Do this in a cryptic and abstruse manner, and refer frequently to scientifically dubious concepts such as anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel.

Elohim Subordinate: As you wish, Grand Master. Only, do you think that maybe this time we might have better success if we landed our Glorious Silvery Saucer in Times Square and delivered a PowerPoint presentation? There are a lot of people there at all times of the day, some of them with video cameras. Perhaps the humans would be more likely to believe us if we did that?

Grand Master Elohim: Are you crazy??!! We don’t want them to know that we are responsible for PowerPoint!

On one of his trips to an Elohim planet (an experience detailed in his imaginatively titled book Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet) Raël was shown all kinds of genetic & molecular tinkering by the aliens and as a consequence introduced those concepts into his movement. He set up the controversial Clonaid in 1997 as a ‘stepping stone to the achievement of immortality’ promising as a sideline to help gay couples have cloned children and to allow people to resurrect identical duplicates of deceased pets (I mean, wtf?). Clonaid gained notoriety in 2002 when Brigitte Boisselier, a Raëlien member of ‘The Order of Angels’, claimed that she had successfully created a cloned baby girl named Eve. The contention was of course rubbish, but it gained the sect a lot of publicity.

Bafflingly, Raël continues to attract people to his beliefs and declares that he has 60,000+ followers. There is no doubt that a portion of the appeal to many is the Raëlian cult’s endorsement of sexual promiscuity among members. This is no surprise after all; sex and science fiction have gone hand-in-hand for decades.

So, is he really a deluded dingbat who thinks that he can communicate with aliens and bootstrap the human race into a new era of enlightenment? Or is he a cynical conman who’s found that starting a religion is a great way to get money, sex and plenty of time in the spotlight. He wouldn’t be the only one.

Maybe we should let his ex-wife, Marie-Paul have the last word. When asked in 2003 if she thought Raël was crazy she said he was ‘not mad, just devious, crafty, manipulative and very, very clever’.

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*Or, like Jasmuheen, says he believes…

†Not that Jim Jones cared much, I guess.

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In late-breaking Antipodean news, an Australian children’s toy called Bindeez has been withdrawn from the market because it contains a chemical that can be metabolized into the ‘party’ drug Fantasy if swallowed.

I’m particularly enamored of the hippy-trippy unicorn picture that the Melbourne Age has used to illustrate the story. A body is forced to contemplate the notion that the manufacturers of Bindeez might’ve been sucking their own product.

Come with us to Candy Mountain, Charlieeeee…

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… and a special Cow salute to all you visiting boingboing readers!

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Addendum: boingboing reader jimh kicks in a lolcat response to the story here.