Before we start on today’s observations, Faithful Acowlytes, I want to remind you of the century in which we currently find ourselves. It is, of course, the 21st Century, where humans have walked on other worlds, routinely fly in marvellous metal contraptions from country to country on a daily basis and communicate instantly with other humans on the other side of the planet.

Got that? Good. Try and keep it in your mind as we move on.

Now.

The Australian reports this week that people who live near Saint Thomas Rest Park, on the North Shore of Sydney, are demanding that the local government install floodlighting because the park is ‘spooky’ at night.

Saint Thomas Park is the site of one of Sydney’s oldest cemeteries and residents who are accustomed to walking their dogs there “are quick to scurry home at sundown, when the area becomes a bit eerie”, according to Australian correspondent Leigh van den Broeke. They scurry, dear Cowpokes, not for fear of the threat of muggings or attacks from dropbears, but because “There are rumours the park is haunted”.

The Daily Telegraph, another of Sydney’s stellar media outlets decided to investigate the claims, and did what any good journal should do and called in some rational, level-headed folks with scientific training who quickly dispelled the stupid rumours.

Hahahaha. No they didn’t! I’m just joshing! But I had you for a moment didn’t I? The Telegraph is a scurrilous and worthless rag, so what they actually did was consult a ghost hunter, of course. At the invitation of the Telegraph, Janine Donnellan from SOul Searches Paranormal Investigations⁽ⁱ⁾ turned up at the park with her ‘electromagnetic energy measuring equipment’ and pronounced (surprise surprise) that there was a restless spirit hanging about a particular cluster of gravestones.

Said Ms Donnellan:

“It’s a male in his 30s or 40s. I saw him at one stage crouching behind one of the graves and then over to another. He noticed me and I was trying to get him engaged in conversation but he was very reticent to do that.”

Personally, I think Ms Donnellan has gotten a bit overly-excited here by her first encounter with your average garden-variety Sydney goth.

Ms Donnellan, according to the Australian, has ‘a certificate of Advanced Achievement in Parapsychology from the Australian Academy of Applied Parapsychology’. You know how fond I am of an accreditation, loyal Cowmrades, so I thought I might just look up the AAAP (as is fairly easy to do with the 21st Century internet-type technology available at my fingertips). Unsurprisingly, the only online presence I can find for the AAAP is a Facebook page which has exactly no information on it, other than offering a claim to be a university. A university? That should be very easy to check. What’s this – they don’t appear to be on the register of universtities kept by the Australian Qualifications Framework, but that’s surely an oversight, right?

The Sart Local business directory has a page for the AAAP though, even if it does give a street address that resolves at the same premises as the Australian College of Hypnotherapy, an establishment that offers courses in a veritable treasure trove of woo (including NLP and EFT⁽ⁱⁱ⁾) Parapsychology doesn’t appear to be on the listing.

So far Ms Donnelly’s credentials are looking about as impressive as her goth detection skills.

Continuing down the Australian article, which is as brainless as it is vague, we find that one of the local residents, a Ms Sue Hamparsum, claims that ‘phantom children’ also inhabit the park: “Three different families have taken photographs of their children at the playground and two little girls appeared in the photographs, but they don’t remember them being there.”⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ Because we always remember everyone who appears in photographs we take, right?

Thankfully, the local council has comprehensively quashed the call for the park to be floodlit (citing, rather disappointingly, the impact on nearby properties instead of simply saying ‘Please stop tying up council staff with your superstitious hysteria you dimwits’).

There is a kind of breathtaking stupidity behind the request in any case. I wonder if you spotted it? That’s right: unless Ms Donnelly’s ghost hunting antics and the families photographing their children all took place at night (and it doesn’t sound to me like that’s very likely), then the ghosts mentioned in this article all appeared in the daytime. WHAT MAKES ANYONE THINK THEY WOULD THEY GIVE A TOSS ABOUT FLOODLIGHTING?!!!

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Footnotes:

1. That link to the SOSPI Facebook page is really worth following if you want some awesome #headdesk #facepalm lulz…
2. Emotional Freedom Therapy. Yes, it’s a new one for me too.
3. I bet the phantom children were creepy twins. Phantom children are always creepy twins.

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I think someone was a few sheets to the wind.

Sometimes some things just annoy the crap out of me. What is it with the daft ‘Keep Calm and [Insert Any Lame Thing Here]‘ plague that stuck its head above the ramparts some years ago now and is STILL lumbering across the memetic landscape like a zombie hopped up on qualudes? Why the hell do people think this is still cool/funny/witty/whatever? In fact, why did they EVER think so?

You will no doubt have read of the Amazon ‘Keep Calm’ debacle in recent weeks, where an apparently random ‘Keep Calm’ generator designed by t-shirt vendor Solid Gold Bomb created almost unbelievably offensive slogans that actually appeared for sale in the Solid Gold Bomb Amazon shop. The mechanics of what happened have been thoroughly examined elsewhere so I won’t go into it here, other than to add the admonishment that you play with random processes at your peril.

The extreme unpleasantness of the affair notwithstanding, it seems to me that the greater crime has been left unexamined: why the fuck is anybody still allowed to sell anything with ‘Keep Calm and [Whatever]‘ emblazoned upon it anyway?

As a meme it started with little value in the first place and proceeded from there on a downhill trek to banal in about the time it takes for a bunch of comedy writers to roundtable and discard a crummy routine (usually about 38 seconds, in my experience). It is a blight upon humanity and people caught perpetuating it (except in the course of exposing its lameness to the world, it goes without saying) should be incarcerated for long periods of time. No, fuck it – let’s bring back drawing and quartering.

Let’s see ‘em keep calm while horses tear their limbs off.

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* I mean, seriously. WHAT. THE. FUCK?

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Those who know me in real life will tell you how fond I am of my barbecuing. I really love to get out there and throw a few prawns on the barbie. Problem is that as the year heads into winter, venturing out to the barbecue to cook an evening meal becomes a little more perilous as the days get shorter and the darkness comes on earlier.

Usually I fend off the shadows with a small torch clenched in my teeth, but as you can probably imagine this is not a convenient way to get a steak cooked properly. Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered today the Gasmate BBQ Grill Light – an LED lamp that conveniently attaches to my barbecue with a clamp or strong magnets.

But what’s this on the packaging? The light, they tell me, is, apparently, ‘all purpose’.

Faithful Cowpokes. The instrument has – surely – only one purpose and one purpose alone: to shed light on the barbecue area. Are you with me on this? I suppose that I could, in desperation, use it as a blunt weapon or an art installation, but even then, it’s not all purpose.

Oh, the mangling of the language. It burns.

Did you guess which one, boys and girls? Did you say ‘herbal teas’?

That’s right! Herbal teas are just teas made from herbs and all the other things are made from BULLSHIT! Do you know what bullshit is, boys and girls? Bullshit is the stuff that comes out the of the butt end of a bull! Yes – bull poo! Hahaha. Isn’t that funny! But it’s not half as funny as believing that magic water or dirty shoe inserts or hot wax in your ear will make your life better. Aren’t some people just so silly?

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*This sign spotted on a recent trip to Port Fairy, in the far south of Australia.

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Hi! My name is Yana, friends and relatives call me Yany.

I am a sociable and cheerful girl and it would be interesting to me to get acquainted with you. I am single and this is why I have decided to write to you. It is spring now and I like this time of year very much, I think it is a great time for acquaintance. If you are interested in getting to know each other then I will be glad to see your letter and picture!

I wish you a good day!I will wait for your email,

Yanka.

Along with which, a selfy snapped with her Nikon:

Yana, with shitty photographic skills like those, you will be waiting for a long time for anyone’s email. If you’re going to take snaps of yourself in the mirror, may I suggest using a phone camera like everybody else in the world does? There are at least two advantages to this:

1. You’d get a shot of yourself in focus, rather than an ad for Nikon.

2. The camera wouldn’t take up more of the picture than your face.

Also, you might want to clean the mirror so that it doesn’t look like you’ve got a big booger on your nose. Oh, and picking up the crap in the background wouldn’t hurt either.

A few days ago Violet Towne and I were down on the south coast of Victoria on a short break. On a day too rainy and bleak to be at the seaside we dropped into an antique and junk place for a rummage, as we like to do, and I was delighted to discover, in one of the more secluded nooks of the building, a framed print of one of the Giovanni Bragolin ‘Crying Boys’.

I was surprised to find that VT did not know the story of the ‘curse’ associated with the Crying Boy, and I thought I might take this opportunity to recap it here for others of you who may not have encountered this quirky piece of urban legend.

Giovanni Bragolin – known also as Bruno Amadio – was a trained classical painter and probably painted the original Crying Boy portraits – all variations on a similar theme – sometime in the early 1950s. It is likely that they were created specifically to sell to tourists as a money-making venture. Whatever the case, at some point Bragolin was evidently fortunate enough to secure a deal to have the paintings copied and printed and made widely available in English department stores in the late 1950s. There were probably many thousands made.⁽ⁱ⁾

For reasons that escape me personally, the Crying Boys were monumentally popular and ended up in households all over Britain (and elsewhere in lesser numbers). And there they hung for decades, doing nothing more confronting than offending the sensibilities of those with good taste. Until…

On the 4th of September 1985, Britain’s popular tabloid, the Sun, ran a story about a fire that destroyed the home of Ron and May Hall, a working class couple from the town of Rotherham in South Yorkshire. The couple put the blame for the blaze on the ‘unlucky’ portrait of the Crying Boy which hung in their living room, which – according to the report – escaped the fire completely unscathed. Not only that, said the Sun, but it was common knowledge among firemen that there had been numerous other instances of this same scenario unfolding in blazes across England: homes devastated by fire, watched over by the completely untouched portrait of a Crying Boy. The picture, the firemen said, was cursed.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

The next day the Sun ran a followup story claiming that their offices had been flooded with calls from readers with pictures of the Crying Boy on their walls, all fearing that they might become victims of the jinxed painting. And so the legend of the Curse of the Crying Boy was born.

Some stories are just made to gather momentum, and this was one. Everyone had a ‘friend of a friend’ who had been affected in some way by the image. Rumours grew that not only did the painting survive house fires, but it could not be burned even if you tried. People who attempted to get rid of the picture fell afoul of bad luck, and some even reported seeing it move on the wall all by itself.

To add kerosene to the flames, it turned out that there were numerous incarnations of the Crying Boy theme painted by other artists – it was a veritable plague of Crying Boys. As I mentioned earlier, they were – puzzlingly – exceptionally popular, and the conjecture must be that in the 70s and 80s in England, if there was a house fire anywhere there was a fair to middling chance that the tenants were in possession of a Crying Boy. This possibly goes at least a little way towards providing some basis for the idea of the curse, but in all probability it can mostly be put down to a case of overactive imaginations and rumour run riot.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

The Sun (perhaps in a moment of conscience, but probably more because they knew how to ride a story to death) did a shout out to readers who were afraid that the picture might bring them ill luck. Send them to us, they said, and we’ll dispose of them for you! The offices of the paper had soon accumulated a staggering 2,500 copies of the Crying Boy, which demonstrates two things clearly, I think: just how popular the damn thing was, and also how frighteningly superstitious the readers of the Sun were.

In an act that just smacks of the British tabloid mindset of the 1980s, on Halloween 1985, Sun employees stacked the prints into a huge pile and they were set ablaze by a popular Page 3 girl. It could only have been more perfect if she’d been topless.

An urban legend isn’t quelled quite so neatly, though, and the Curse of the Crying Boy didn’t simply go up in smoke with the bonfire. Over the next decade it neatly transmogrified from fleeting newspaper titillation into full-blown myth, and lives on today, with many new riffs on the original story. Hang a Crying Boy next to a Crying Girl (yes, they exist too), it is said, and the bad luck will be thwarted. Hang ten copies of the Crying Boy together and the bad vibes are similarly dissipated (you’ll need some good luck finding ten copies these days, though). Whole narratives have arisen around the artist who painted the original picture and the supposed identity of the Boy himself, all with little or no basis in fact. Stories of disasters involving the Boy now come from countries all across the world and he is so embedded in popular culture that he even sports a Facebook page, of sorts.^(iv)

But I can sense the question on your minds, Faithful Cowpokes: did I buy the copy I saw? Sadly, I didn’t. I probably should have, but the truth is that I wasn’t totally familiar with the version hanging in the antique shop, and didn’t know if it was ‘the real deal’ as it were. That’s why I snapped the pic of it that you saw above – I wanted to check its provenence (there was no mobile reception, otherwise I’d have done it on the spot).

Oh, and anyway, as if I’d hang it in my house. Are you crazy?

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UPDATE: The Crying Boy spotted on eBay in Israel. Printed on a magnet! (WARNING: May cause your fridge to burst into flames)

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Footnotes:

1. Actual statistics are hard to come by, with various reports citing quantities from 50,000 to a quarter of a million, but given the widespread popularity of the prints, and the fact that they still turn up in junk shops on the other side of the planet, we can be fairly sure that a large number of them were made.
2. No fireman actually said this, as it turns out, but the Sun was very happy to let the implication stick.
3. There are many ‘supernatural’ explanations, of course, but they are banal and tedious and probably without any foundation in fact. You can, if you are so inclined, chase them up via the excellent Fortean Times redux of the Crying Boy Curse.
4. It’s a bit of a pathetic effort, really, and could be HUGELY more entertaining in my opinion.

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Over at World Homeopathy Org we learn that this year is a very special year in which we are focussing on homeopathy for trauma and disasters.

Via a series of rotating banner images, World Homeopathy Org is giving us some idea of just how awesome and amazing homeopathy truly is with its many and varied uses. The image above, for example, tells us that homeopathy is surely your first stop after being struck by lightning – something of which I was unaware, but there you go.

Homeopathy is a sure-fire prophylactic for bad weather in general as we see in our next slide.

Yes, the debilitating effects of stormy seas can be addressed by homeopathy – remember, we don’t mean merely seasickness here, because this is Trauma and Disaster Week. No, my friends, we’re surely talking about the medical aftermath brought on by massive storms and tsunamis. Homeopathy is a veritable life preserver for such events…

As it is in the case of cyclones and tornadoes…

I know it’s the first thing I’d think of after my house was ripped to smithereens by a 400 mile per hour wind.

“Goodness, that was terrifying. Better take some homeopathy to help with this severed artery.”

Homeopathy also comes into play in the tragic circumstances of awful graphic design.

In this case, we see a graphic designer almost at the point of suicide after depicting himself quite badly as being almost at the point of suicide. He really needs homeopathy.

Homeopathy is also what you should turn to in the traumatic event that you discover you have freckles and have been processed with a crummy Photoshop filter.

Well, it can’t hurt, right?

But seriously folks, back to the war zones.

If you should find yourself being on the wrong end of a policeman’s truncheon whilst simply attempting to carry out your job as war correspondent, why not pop some Arnica 30c? It’s also good if you get tear-gassed. Fumbling around to find the bottle will surely take your mind off the excruciating acidic blinding sensations for, oh, a nanosecond or two. And if you’re really bolshie, maybe you can smear a little Natrum Phosphoricum ointment on that thug attacking you – he really looks like he needs some calming down.

But the next slide is getting down to the nitty gritty.

Here we see a young girl who has plainly lost everything she has, and is in the depths of despair. If there is something she really needs here, it’s homeopathy. Am I right?

And should the disasters get even more terrifying – we’re talking about world scale cataclysms brought on by wayward asteroids – homeopathy will really come to the fore.

When I look at the above image, I am seriously hoping that the people in those houses have dosed themselves up sufficiently on Calcarea Carbonica and Arsenicum. It’s surely the only way they’re going to survive ten million tons of water crushing them into a soggy bloody pulp.

The last slide in our presentation gives us an overview of the incredible range and depth of possibilities that might be addressed with homeopathic insight:

My goodness! Terrorism, droughts, volcanoes, landslides, nuclear radiation, bombings, blizzards, avalanches and locusts! Is there nothing that can’t be made better with homeopathy? That’s a rhetorical question, because no, there isn’t.

Homeopathy! The cure that’s so effective that nearly two centuries from its inception no-one can provide a single incontrovertible example of it actually working.

Let’s close with our favourite video of homeopathy’s most persuasive spokeswoman because, well, because I know you want it. Happy World Homeopathy Awareness Week, y’all!

Like a bunch of other people I recently saw Ang Lee’s screen interpretation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. I thought the film was pretty good – a decent cinematic imagining of the tale, even if it did gloss over some of the subtleties of the book.⁽ⁱ⁾ That’s the legacy of cinema of course – commercial pressure sees to it that any idea, big or small, must be squashed into a two or three hour format no matter what the consequence to the idea. But this is not going to be one of my film reviews, you will be pleased to hear. Instead, I want to talk about the premise of the story of Life of Pi itself, and why I think its pop wisdom coda is curiously diffuse and widely misinterpreted.

[Spoilers: To make the point of my post I must necessarily relate plot details and give away the ending, so if that bothers you, you probably should stop reading now.]

The framework for the novel relies on a conceit that has an anonymous narrator relating an incident in which he meets an elderly man who offers to tell him a story fantastic enough to give him faith in God. By inference, we, the reader will also become convinced enough by this wondrous affair when it is revealed to us, to adopt faith in God ourselves.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

The rest of the tale is then told in the first person voice of Piscine Patel – the eponymous ‘Pi’ – and concerns the adventures that ensue when his father, a zookeeper, is forced to close the family menagerie and sell the animals to other zoos around the world. As the story sets out, we learn of a young Pi’s attempts to make some sense of the religions he reads about in school. His efforts to square those beliefs with the harsh lessons of nature he witnesses among the animals in the zoo culminate in him taking the unusual step of adopting Christianity, Hindi and Islam all together – because he can’t see that any one of these doctrines by itself is exclusively of merit. And still, we sense, he is not happy. It sets Pi apart as a curious and conflicted boy, searching for answers that come neither from his rationalist meat-eating father or from his religious vegetarian mother.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ The main part of the story takes place when the family set off to Canada via ship, to escort the last of the zoo animals to their new home. The voyage doesn’t go well, and the ship sinks in bad weather, eventuating in the death of Pi’s family and all the animals save a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and the memorable ‘Richard Parker’ – a Bengal tiger – the four of whom end up adrift in a lifeboat with Pi. The hyena, zebra and orangutan don’t last long for various reasons and what then ensues is a highly improbable fantastic journey, in which Pi trains Richard Parker not to eat him and the two companions witness all manner of marvels including phosphorescent sea creatures, great flocks of flying fish and a carnivorous island inhabited by meerkats. It’s a sweet and engaging tale.

Yann Martel intends it to be more than simply that, though. Navigating past assorted obstacles that are mostly philosophical and/or religious feints that are, unfortunately I think, never really addressed or resolved, Pi and Richard Parker become ever more desperate, until at last, dehydrated and starving, they are washed up on a Mexican beach. Richard Parker immediately vanishes into the jungle with nary a tip of the cap or a cheerio, and Pi is rescued by some itenerant fishermen. On his recovery, he is obliged to undertake an interview with Japanese officials attempting to discover the cause of the disaster which shipwrecked him. Quite understandably, they find his tale completely implausible, and so he tells them another more brutal human story in which, instead of animals, some members of the crew and his mother end up in the lifeboat. They all die in unpleasant but probable ways, and the Japanese investigators draw the conclusion that Pi’s first story is an allegorical recounting of what really happened.

‘But which story do you prefer?’ asks Pi.

The investigators choose the version with the animals.

Pi thanks them and says, ‘And so it goes with God.’

In 2010 Barack Obama wrote a letter directly to Yann Martel, describing Life of Pi as ‘an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling’. It makes me wonder whether President Obama read the same book as I did, and if so, where the ‘proof of God’ actually was, because it seems to me that it’s the very antithesis of that.^(iv)

It bothers me deeply that people seem to have read the story in this way. Life of Pi provides no compelling argument for someone to take up faith in God (which was the promise made by our narrator in the beginning, as you will recall). Nor, indeed, does it advance any kind of advocacy for religious belief.^(v) Sure, it indisputably does offer up a wonderful poetic vision of why it would be nice to think that God exists, but just look at that coda: ‘Which version’ asks Pi ‘…do you prefer?’ Isn’t that as plain as day?

Of course we all prefer the story with the tiger and the magical luminous creatures and the spooky island^(vi) – but preferring it makes it neither true nor illuminating. It just means it is a nice story. In the event, Pi’s journey has no material significance as far as the Japanese officials’ investigation is concerned, so a fictional recounting is neither better nor worse than the truth for the purposes of their report.

With this in mind, a sensible person would surely interpret the message of the book as: Believe whatever makes you feel good as long as it has no relevance to real life. To accept that this holds any kind of profundity, though, is as absurd as saying that it’s rational to discard the truth for fanciful ideas about Santa Claus, or elves, or the Tooth Fairy, simply because all those are preferable stories. These are concepts we entertain when we are children; fantasies that are quite harmless in the protected realm of childhood but which break down when confronted with rational scrutiny. People who still believe – literally – in the Tooth Fairy into their adulthood tend to have a lot of trouble dealing with the real world.^(vii)

In addition, and perhaps more gratingly, this conclusion – that choosing to believe in a nice story is preferable to committing to actual reality – sells the alternative short. It diminishes the wondrous nature of the universe by squashing it under the squalor of the worst aspects of humanity. Pi’s alternative narrative is an unpleasant and uncomfortable one, evoking as it does all the terrible (animal) traits of human beings. It’s certainly not a story someone would ‘prefer’ to live through, but it is the story we are obliged to live through. The obvious takeaway for most people seems to be that the lively fantasy version of the tale, with its more-than-human animals is somehow truer to the way humans ‘really’ are. It’s a familiar hubristic 19th century Judaeo-Christian worldview. Despite its 21st century multicultural pretensions to a lofty spiritual philosophy Life of Pi veritably reverberates with the echoes of the fairytales of Rudyard Kipling and A. A. Milne. Religious thought has ever been like this. It wants to hijack the noble parts of humanity and make a claim on them, whilst distancing itself from the bestial, the venal and the mortal, but the fact is that we humans will never truly be on the path to a worthwhile future as long as we try to set ourselves apart from nature. We can simply ignore what we’re really like or we can attend to it and attempt to address the bad bits. It is a magnificent talent that we can make up colourful and imaginative stories, but we should never, ever, start preferring to believe in them to the detriment of seeking real, touchable, relevant knowledge.

Unless, of course, the consequences actually don’t matter. Then go ahead and believe anything you want.

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Footnotes:

1. …and lean a little too heavily on other not-so-subtle things…
2. In the movie, the narrator is personified as a young novelist looking for a story and it is an older Pi who offers to provide the justification for faith. This whole mechanism seems tacked-on and clumsy, and exists solely as a setup for the flimsy ‘gotcha’ moment in the finale. When I read the book it tainted the whole experience for me, because I was constantly waiting for the whammy. It would have been SO much more elegant without it, and seems like such an awful high-school flub that I’m totally surprised that it wasn’t heavily criticized. It would have lent the story an ambiguity – indeed, a point – that certainly wouldn’t have prompted a gushing letter from Barack Obama. I can’t say exactly why, but the mechanism was more irksome in the film. It’s been several years since I read the book, so maybe I’m just more touchy on the subject these days…
3. Yes, when you put it like that, it does seem rather heavy-handed, doesn’t it? But I’m just telling it like it is.
4. Even now, I am compelled to wonder if Martel intended to write an endorsement of atheism but chickened out at the last minute – for, without the framing story, that’s exactly how you would read Life of Pi.
5. You could argue that the island with the meerkats is an allegorical criticism of organised religion, in fact.
6. Although I feel I must point out that there are undoubtedly writers who could have made the other story as equally compelling, compassionate and poignant if they’d turned their hands to it. It’s another conceit of the novel – in pursuit of its high moral ground – to paint reality as something that is distasteful, miserable and undesirable.
7. Indeed, people who hold ‘religious’ beliefs that don’t square with the endorsed and accepted ones face exactly this problem too. You’re an Aetherian? Seriously? [woooo-eee-oooo]

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Akismet has protected your site from 798,732 spam comments already.

Woohoo! Well on the way to the Big 1 Million.

Simple Graphics Man is still on holidays (which explains why he hasn’t reported in lately) but even so he finds himself called on from time to time in a professional capacity – often to help with translational matters. Currently, he’s in Venice and here we see him explaining that those grumpy gondoliers on the Grand Canal won’t punt for you (let alone belt out a chorus of O Sole Mio) if you try to pay them with filthy Euro notes. Exact change, my man, or it’s an oar where the sun don’t shine.

SGM! Mind your balance there buddy!

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Many thanks to Karl once again for this – and for some upcoming Venetian SGM adventures as well!

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You saw Laura a couple of days ago as she arrived, straight out of the box. She was not quite as perfect as I would have liked, so the first step involved some surgery…

As did the second step. ‘Trust me Laura,’ I said ‘I’m a doctor’. Well, I’m a Reverend, and that’s as good as, right? I mean, with God the Cow on my side, how can I do wrong? A little release of intracranial pressure…

Ah, that’s better. And now for the pièce de résistance… And Binauralaura (Laura to her friends) is ready to begin to listen…

Binauralaura is my new binaural recording rig. Here begins the edumacation part of this post, so those who came for the titillation can now go watch Fox news and eat donuts.

To start, you should know that when you hear a stereo recording of sound or music – pretty much any recording – it is presented to your ear in a very different way to the way in which you actually hear in reality. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that most sound recordings, and most music recordings in particular, use a somewhat artificial method to render their stereophonic sonic landscape. In a standard electronically-reproduced stereo domain, the stereo image is created from two point sources – your two hifi speakers, or two headphone speakers – each of which is fed by a discrete channel of recorded sound. All sound in a stereo field is thus contained in two separate, but interconnected, recordings – one for left and one for right. In simple terms, if a sound is only in the left channel, it will appear to come from your left. If it is only in the right channel, it will appear to come from your right. In almost all modern recordings, when an engineer wishes to make a sound feel like it is originating elsewhere in the stereo image – slightly left of centre, for instance – it is made slightly louder in the left channel than it is in the right. To make it appear to be right in front of you – or ‘centre’ as we say – then the volume is made exactly equal for both the left and the right channels. For over half a century, this result has been achieved by ‘panning’ the sound on a mixing console. A panner is simply a control that varies the amount of signal (or loudness) added to each channel.

In the real world, though, our ears don’t judge the position of a sound in space solely by its loudness. Certainly, loudness is one aspect of the mechanism, but there are numerous other factors in play. The principal one is a component of time. If you hear a dog barking somewhere ahead of you, and slightly to the left, one of your ears will be receiving a slightly greater sound pressure (loudness) than the other. But crucially, that same ear will be hearing the sound very slightly before your other ear does. The human brain can, in fact, differentiate time differences smaller than 10 microseconds between your two ears, and it is that ability which allows us to aurally locate objects in space with an accuracy of about 1 degree.^(i)(ii) Up until very recently, this time component could not be easily recreated in a studio mixing environment, and since – like most things – the recording process is a trade-off between the achievement of perfection and economic imperative, the old panning paradigm is still alive and well (and dominant) in modern sound mixing facilities. I would make a rough guess that 99.9% of all music and sound you hear is rendered to stereo with crude analogue panning.

Now, some of you may be ahead of me slightly here, and interject: ‘But Reverend, what about a recording made solely with two microphones? There’s no mixing console involved there (so no artificial panning) and the sound of any object off centre to the microphones must arrive at slightly different times for each? Surely that’s preserved in a recording?’

Well, yes indeed. Two separate microphones (or a coincident stereo pair, to use the lingo) will indeed preserve the delay times inherent in the scene being recorded but they still don’t hear the world like our ears do.

The important thing to understand at this point is that when it comes to human hearing, our eardrums – our ‘microphones’ if you like – are only part of the story. There are several other key players in the process, the most important of which is our brain. Our brain and ears work together to ‘hear’ the world, and the way we hear is a lot more complex and clever than you probably ever stopped to think about.

One thing that every one of us knows (because our brain figures it out pretty much as soon as we are born) is that our ears are separated from one another by a head. Everything we experience in the realm of natural hearing is mitigated by this big noggin right in the middle of things. And our brain calculates our aural experience by taking it into account as it forms our sonic picture of the world. Likewise, we are accustomed to hearing our surroundings via two fleshy reflectors that funnel the sound toward the vibrating membranes that actually detect the sound waves. The complicated contours of our ears – the pinnae – don’t simply look like they do for decoration. The whorls and cavities of the ear surface impose certain kinds of characteristics on the sound that reaches them, and these help us with sound localisation, and, to a certain extent, with the perception of fidelity.

Which brings me all the way back to Binauralaura. Laura’s head contains a pair of high fidelity omnidirectional microphones that sit in her ears just at about the place where the outside part of the human ear canal would start.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

Her silicon pinnae are created from a CT scan of real human ears and these and her head create an aural ‘shadow’ which will match, in a generic way, the listening field of most humans.^(iv) This means that a recording made with Binauralaura, will sound about as real as an audio recording can sound.^(v)

So if binaural recording is so magnificent, why isn’t it used for everything? Well, there is, of course, a catch. The binaural effect can only properly be discerned by wearing headphones. For the binaural image to remain coherent, the sound for one ear must not interfere with the sound for the other. Additionally, in order to avoid a doubling of the head and pinnae shadow (one gained from the recording, and then a second from the listener’s own head and pinnae), the reproduced sound needs to be played back as close to the listener’s ear canal entrance as possible. The most expedient method to do this is via headphones or earbuds.^(vi) Wearing headphones to properly hear binaural sound is, in fact, analogous to the requirement to wear glasses to see 3D images (indeed, binaural sound is often described as ’3D’ or ‘holophonic’ sound).

I’ve had some opportunities to take Laura out for a bit of a test spin, and so far, the results are pretty nice. Here’s a short clip. Remember – wear headphones or earbuds to listen to it. One thing you will immediately notice is the clarity and and detail of the sound space. If your hearing is fair, you may also detect one of the extraordinary features of binaural sound – something you will not hear in a conventional stereophonic recording – and that is the ability to localise sound height. Have a listen now, and see why I went to all the trouble to build Binauralaura.

Download Laura Listens

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Footnotes:

1. It’s more accurate if the sound is in front of you. As it approaches the extreme sides, the ability to pinpoint its location decreases.
2. As an aside, there is a species of fly which is so small that its ears are too close together for its head to have any effect on time delays between them. Instead, it has evolved an entirely different and novel way of localizing sound. The trick it uses (its ears are physically coupled together, allowing it to detect sub-microsecond delays) is currently being explored as a possible microphonic technique.
3. Not where the ear drums are – there’s a technical reason for this that I won’t go into here, but there are versions of binaural heads that do place the microphones right at the end of the ear canal.
4. It probably has occurred to you that most humans have small differences in the shapes and sizes of their ears. Shouldn’t this mean that one person hears differently to another? Well, yes, that’s right. To make a really convincing binaural recording for yourself, you would ideally put microphones in your own ears, and record with your own pinnae and head shape. Indeed, there are methods for doing this. To me, it does seem rather sonically masturbatory, though…
5. There are numerous other impediments to capturing a sound recording that would appear as real as reality. Mostly this has to do with the way our brain constantly interacts with the environment – not just the sound itself – to modify what we hear. And, in fact, what we think we hear is nothing like what we physcially hear. This problem is never really likely to ba addressed with a mechanical recording system. Until we have some kind of direct ‘neural recorder’ you can never really expect to experience a sound recording that is like really hearing something.
6. There are ways of achieving a serviceable binaural illusion in stereo speaker systems, but they are expensive, dependent on room acoustics, and require the listener to sit in a ‘sweet’ spot. Needless to say, all this is even less appealing than wearing headphones.

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And now nine whole years have passed. It’s a strange and sad universe. Rest in peace KPop.

This is my new assistant. I am about to augment her for my secret project. Hint: she is not a Roman.

Jaffa cake
Pronunciation: /ˈʤafəkeɪk/

Definition of Jaffa cake:

noun
British

a sponge biscuit with an orange-flavoured jelly and chocolate topping.

This is what I got in the mail yesterday. I figured that as one gets older, it’s de rigeuer to enhance one’s best assetts with silicone, right?

Heh. Just kidding. I have a project. It should be interesting. I’ll tell you all about it as I go.

The other day, whilst in a philosophical mood, I got to musing on whether there would be any way for humans to tell if we were being kept as pets by some alien intelligence.

Consider the goldfish that we keep in our kitchen.

I doubt that they have even the foggiest idea that the glass-walled vessel in which they find themselves is in any way strange. Or even that they have any idea of what ‘glass’ is, or what ‘strange’ is. They are quite obviously accustomed to the large shadowy figures that loom over them from time to time, and have come to associate these figures with food, which makes for obvious excitement for them. Their goldfishy brains probably can’t even encompass the idea of humans, or a kitchen bench, or meatballs and tomato sauce (which is what I happen to be cooking for dinner as I write this).

But what if we are like that? If we were the pets of aliens, how would we even know? Our puny human brains might be to them as goldfish brains are to us. If we are being kept in the alien equivalent of a glass tank on an alien kitchen bench, how could we even know, if we are unable to contain the concept of alien glass, or alien kitchen benches or alien meatballs? If we know nothing other than the circumstances in which we find ourselves – like the goldfish, raised in tanks in an aquarium and transported in plastic bags to a new home – what possible reference point could we have?

As silly as this sounds, I don’t mean it to be a flippant question. It is at least as plausible as any other hypothesis for why we are here, and it is just as unfalsifiable as postulating the existence of God, or alternative universes, or that we are a computer simulation.

If you accept that there are grades of intelligent awareness possible in the universe (and our own experience tells us that goldfish seem to be less aware of the universe than we are, and at the same time more aware of the nature of things than bacterium, say, so that appears to be a fairly reasonable assumption) then putting ourselves at the top of the intelligent awareness ladder seems a tad presumptuous. Is there any way, therefore, to know whether our reality is a ‘natural’ one or whether we are in an alien goldfish bowl?

I suspect not. But the places to start looking would be things in our universe that seem to be a little too ‘convenient’ for us to be here. And there are, indeed, some of those.

Say what you will about the various social media, there is one thing at which they really excel: providing a brand new platform for the endless circulation of the kind of inane and poorly informed pop ‘wisdom’ that we love so much here on TCA. Just recently, for example, I’ve been sent the same exhortation about five times to sign an Avaaz petition against Bayer for being responsible (via their manufacture and marketing of insecticides called neonicotinoids) for bee Colony Collapse Disorder. Now, while I don’t particularly hold with the use of Bayer’s products, and don’t even particularly like Bayer as a company, this irks and frustrates me. What Avaaz is doing here is piggybacking an agenda on top of an emotionally-charged issue to give the impression that CCD is being caused by one simple mechanism, and that Bayer should be held responsible. As I’ve written before, it is far from being quite that simple.⁽ⁱ⁾ Unfortunately, very few people who get the link to the Avaaz petition will know much, if anything, about bee Colony Collapse Disorder, and not bother to take the trouble to research the Avaaz claims. And so the ‘OMG! The Bees Are Dying Sign the Petition’ suggestion will no doubt circulate for another few weeks, etching into people’s minds the notion that Evil Bayer is Killing Bees (supplanting the previously-etched notion in most of those same people’s minds that the culprit was mobile phones).^(ii)(iii)

Anyhoo, that’s all really just a way of introducing the real subject of today’s post, which is another wonderful social media ‘advice’ epidemic which also concerns honey. Honey and cinnamon, in fact. It’s very lengthy, so I’m not copying it here, but you should really go have a look at it so you can witness the true scale of its stupidity (you can find it linked just about everywhere across the net, so ubiquitous has it become).

Synopsizing, it begins with a warning that ‘Drug companies won’t like this one getting around!’ and goes on to list ways in which the combination of honey and cinnamon will cure EVERYTHING. Well, I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

Here are just some of the troubles that you will no longer have if you imbibe and/or smear yourself liberally with honey and cinnamon:

•Heart Disease
•Arthritic pain
•Bladder infections
•Colds
•Weight gain
•Stomach ailments
•Gas
•Cancer (oh yes)
•Pimples
•Aging (!)
•Hearing loss.

I’m totally sure the drug companies would be mightily pissed off if there was even a grain of truth in any of it, but there ain’t so they happily continue with their business of converting their piles of cash into cocaine and snorting it off stripper’s tits.^(iv)

The long list of cures ends with the folksy signoff: ‘Remember when we were kids? We had toast with real butter and cinnamon sprinkled on it! Re-post!’

Because, you know, we never had any of those problems when we were kids, right? Except for the poor tykes with cancer who obviously didn’t eat their cinnamon toast.

The thing that really ticks me off is the completely undiscriminating way in which this stupid piece of internet diarrhoea is pooped all across the various social media platforms even by those who should know a LOT better. This is the internet, people. It should be the work of moments to find out the bona fides of this gob of banal hogwash.

And moments it takes. Less than thirty seconds of Searching™ turns up the original source of the Cinnamon and Honey gumpf:

That’s right, Space Cadets. The provenance of this piece of 21st Century wisdom is an article published in 1995 by that veritable shining bastion of scientific respectability, The Weekly World News. It’s travelled down almost two decades unscathed. What’s that you say? What other scientific discoveries has WWN delivered up? I’m so glad you asked.

I mean, for fuck’s sake. Who’s going to believe Dick Cheney is a robot? We all know perfectly well that he’s really a lizard!^(v)
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Footnotes:

1. As we have seen time and time again here on TCA, human beings just lurve to fall for the most simplistic solutions to complex problems. Our brains shy away from complexity. We are not made to cope with it, and we deal with it badly.
2. What’s actually killing bees, my friends, is that voracious, deadly scourge of the planet Earth – human beings. Our demand for cheap honey (and for cheap fruit and flowers and grains and all the plants that the bees rely on to make that honey) is creating a population pressure on the bees that is just not something that they cope with well. We’ve made bees into something they are not, for our own purposes, and while that works to an extent, it is truly not surprising that it is not a sustainable prospect.
3. One friend commented to me that surely the fact that Bayer was not necessarily responsible for CCD is irrelevant if they’re doing something environmentally irresponsible – an ‘end-justifies-the-means’ argument, if you will. That’s all well & good – maybe the petition will get one environmentally undesirable substance out of the way BUT the bees will still be dying. It deflects the view of the public away from addressing the actual problems, and so is, in my opinion, doing more harm than good.
4. This is a colourful metaphor, intended to provide humour. It is not meant to imply that drug companies make huge swodges of profit at the expense of our health. Because we know that they are all doing it for the love of humankind.
5. This QED really is SOOOO much better than I could ever have hoped for. I wish all rubbish of this kind was so easily slapped down.

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