Tetherd Cow Ahead

I have often said, Faithful Acowlytes, in my many long rants, that if someone provided evidence of some daft contentious claim or other I would, like any good scientest and skeptic, be completely prepared change my mind.

It appears that today is that day.

You may remember my post Hunting Unicorns, in which I talked about my personal path to my current rationalist and skeptical view of the world, and in which I stated that if one wanted to prove the existence of unicorns, then all one need do, is provide the unicorn.

Time Magazine reports that North Korea has finally done so.

Yes, North Korea, a bastion of logical discourse in a world beset by superstition and irrationality, tells us that they have not only confirmed the location of the burial site of the unicorn ridden by King Dongmyeong, the founding father of the ancient Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, but that they have reconfirmed it!

The proof is unassailable: the unicorn grave site is indicated by a rock carved with the words ‘Unicorn Lair’. I mean, how much more does anyone want?

Also, Tetherd Cow researchers have uncovered a picture of North Korea’s current Glorious Leader riding a descendant of King Dongmyeong’s wondrous mystical steed:

Let’s see the skeptics refute that, right?

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Thanks Atlas!

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I suppose not many of you have failed to notice that the very clever boffins and boffinesses at NASA did something fairly impressive this week. And within scant minutes of touching down on the Red Planet’s surface, the MSL rover, Curiosity, was sending us back snapshots like the true-colour image above. Ah yes, the ochre and dun hues so very familiar to aficionados of NASA’s exploration of the Martian landscape.

One of the great things about such science, I always think, is the wonderful inspiration that it has throughout the community. For example: so galvanized was coloured nail gel providore Gelicious by NASA’s adventure, that they even whipped up a special Curiosity Does Mars nail colour package.

Inspired by Colour? They sure were! Mostly by the colours they already had in their range – which weren’t exactly very Mars-true it has to be said. But no problemo! If you don’t have colours to match Mars, just change the colour of Mars to match your ‘inspiration’. Conundrum solved! Can’t have facts getting in the way of an advertising opportunity, can we?

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Thanks to Cissy Strutt for this gem.

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What do you get, Faithful Acowlytes, if you take one big frakking Pile of Stupid, and then multiply it by another big frakking Pile of Stupid? Give up? You get this article (kindly pointed out to me by dinahmow) called ‘Trituration Proving of the Light of Saturn’ on a website named Interhomeopathy. Or, to speak technically for a moment, you get a Great Mountain of Steaming Horseshit. What we’re talking here Cowpokes, is astrology meets homeopathy.

I know you just can’t wait.

In brief, the ‘Trituration Proving of the Light of Saturn’, provides a detailed account of a group of people chopping up lactose powder that has been exposed, via a telescope, to the light of Saturn, and then attempting to discover the ‘homeopathic effects’ of the substance so prepared.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The method employed to gather this data involves the process of homeopathic ‘proving’. In case you don’t know what that is (and why would you, really?), it involves a bunch of volunteers dosing up on the material in question and then writing down any and all kinds of shit that occurs to them. By processes unfathomable, that shit is then distilled into less shit, and whatever that shit is, the homeopathic remedy is the opposite of it. Got that? No? Well, I can’t say as I blame you, but there it is.

What we have here, in essence, is an outpouring of inebriated hogwash so profound as to make the documentation of Special One Drop Liquid look like Einstein’s ruminations on the Photoelectric Effect. Only I fear that unlike the SODL proprietor, the people behind TPLS could not be technically labelled clinically insane. Frighteningly enough.

To give you a flavour, from the convenor’s notes:

The trituration process began with lots of giggling and silliness; and throughout there was talk of getting high, stories about getting high. Senses were distorted.⁽ⁱ⁾ One prover kept seeing smoke rise from the milk sugar as she ground and scraped.

And to think some people say there’s no science in homeopathy!

The conversation kept circling back to pizza: “Any food in the universe can be better with cheese… One prover demonstrated a seductive way of eating a sandwich.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.

The timekeeper had tremendous difficulty keeping track of the time for the grinding and scraping of the remedy throughout the entire process.

Yeah, I can see how this would be challenging. I’m experiencing something of a time-dilation effect just trying to follow it all.

Head pain over eyes. Sharp pain right temple. Pressive pain right temple.
Head ache over left eye.

I’m with you, provers! I’m getting a head pain just reading about it. That shit sure is powerful.

The female provers especially experienced a great deal of itchiness: Head, nose, eyes itchy. Head itchy. Back itchy, breasts itchy, thighs. Waves of itchiness in various parts of body, especially head.

YES! YES! I too have an itchy head. Right inside my head, where my brain is, specifically the part of the brain that tries to understand how a group of evolved hominids can be so mind-numbingly daft. It’s so itchy I want to stick a knitting needle through my eye cavity in an effort to scratch it.

And on, and on, and on it goes, in an elliptic waffle of hippie noodling that just makes me sad that these people were snorting the fumes of lactose rather than inhaling the spores of some kind of exotic fungus. From all this, it is concluded, somehow, that the Saturn-exposed milk sugar…

…might be effective for accident-related trauma, bone and nerve damage.

Yes, that’s right. Not that it might cure itching, or inhibit cheese cravings, or headaches or giggling, but that it might be effective for accident-related trauma. How they reached that conclusion, I have no fucking idea. It’s simply boggling that anybody can think there’s actual medical value in this whole process.

I know you’ll be right there with me, loyal Cowmrades, when we tune in next week for the next instalment of this astonishing adventure: Beneficial Effects of the Light from Uranus on Unicorn Rainbow Powder.

Please, someone wake me up.

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Footnotes:

1. This is probably the most accurate assessment in the whole debacle. [↩]

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You may remember that some time back I told you about the exceedingly odd Bleeding Tooth Fungus that grew in my backyard. Well now, after Violet Towne spotted the above seaweed-like stuff on our driveway the other day, I think I may have to start up a new Cow Category called ‘Weird Shit That Mysteriously Appears In My Garden’. There were dozens of clumps of it, and it looks just like something you might find on the beach at low tide.⁽ⁱ⁾ Only we’re 20 kilometers away from the nearest ocean, and this stuff was still damp.

Turns out that this is the colony form of a rehydrated genus of cyanobacteria called Nostoc. Nostoc can be found pretty much everywhere in the world, and due to the bacteria’s ability to survive (and even thrive) in harsh environments it is even quite happy in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Most of the time the Nostoc colony goes completely unnoticed, but after a lot of rain, it may swell up into jelly-like blobs such as the ones in my garden. Its sudden appearance on the ground with no apparent cause has earned it the folk name of Star Jelly, as it was thought to have fallen from the sky.

Nostoc is also known (much more evocatively) as Witches’ Butter or Troll’s Butter and some species are in fact eaten, particularly in Asia where people seem to delight in gobbling down disgusting things. There’s no way I’m chowing down on it. For one thing it’s been found to containe Beta-methylamino L-alanine, a toxic amino acid that has been implicated in degenerative brain diseases.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

I have a simple dietary guideline in this respect: Never eat or drink anything that looks or smells like some kind of biological excretion. It has served me well thus far.
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Footnotes:

1. Or in a troll’s nostril. [↩]
2. Although I have to say that in my opinion anyone who would consider eating it is well along the degenerative brain disease path in the first place… [↩]

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This man is Michael Cohen. Mr Cohen, it seems, has come by an amazing piece of video that ‘might be amongst the best proof we have that we are indeed being visited by aliens coming to us with a message of hope.’ The footage was taken in the Brazilian jungle by British tourists and ‘handed over to US secret agents’, the Brazilian government apparently having some kind of agreement with American spooks to obligingly do that kind of thing. It is unclear who then handed it on to Mr Cohen. We know for certain that the footage is Top Secret because it has a title card that says ‘Top Secret’ on it.

I mean, how much more persuasive could it be?

‘Stop stalling Reverend!’ I hear you cry. ‘Make with the video that shows us the alien Message of Hope! Well, you need to visit the site of that esteemed Australian news voice The Telegraph to see it, because I can’t embed it. Come back here when you’re done (if you don’t need a bit of a lie down first, that is).

Was that a Message of Hope or what?! Thank Xenu that we now know we are not alo… What’s that you say? You missed the alien? Seriously? Maybe you’d better watch it again. I’ve made you a little diagram so that you know where to look:

Was it better that time? Did you see the ‘mesmerising flashing light’ as well?

Mr Cohen proclaims that ‘This is highly compelling footage that will be hard to discredit’. Or it could be plain old pareidolia. I know that sounds far fetched, but hey. Should the footage turn out to be bona fide, however, what I want to know is what the little alien is actually doing here. He doesn’t seem to be delivering any Message of Hope to me. In fact, he seems… a little preoccupied.

Here’s a better resolution closeup. That’s the ‘mesmerising light’ over on the right – it’s gotta be his spaceship, right? So he’s parked it and has wandered a little way away behind a tree, and… well… it’s a bloody LONG WAY from Zeta Reticuli!

Acowlytes! Tell me I’m wrong!