Tetherd Cow Ahead

Portrait of the Artist as a Casualty of a Quantum Anomaly.

Many years ago, my good friend Bronni & I used to amuse ourselves by taking well known proverbs with animals in them and substituting a cow for said animal.

This was a source of constant mirth. So for today’s diversion, I give you:

•Like a cow up a drainpipe.

•Flat out like a cow drinking.*

•That’s put a bit of a cow in the ointment!†

•Wow, she really has a cow in her bonnet!

•That’s put the cow among the pigeons!

•More tricky than herding cows.

•Better a cow in the hand than two in the bush!

•He’s a real cow in the grass.

•As cunning as a cow.

•The early bird catches the cow.

•Like a cow on a hot tin roof.

•I’d like to be a cow on the wall for that conversation…

OK Acowlytes – over to you. The one that makes me laugh most gets a Cow Medallion!

UPDATE: It occurs to me that some of you may have missed the point of this particular activity. It’s all about the image that you form in your head when you do the transposition of animals. For instance: ‘a cow on a hot tin roof’ conjures an amusing vision of a cow clattering along on your corrugated iron verandah awning… Get it?

So:

‘Cow in a gilded cage’ = Funny
‘Let sleeping cows lie’ = Not Funny

See – it’s not just as easy as chucking the word ‘cow’ in any old proverb.

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*Hmm. Some of these might be a little obscure to non-Australians…

†Isn’t ‘ointment’ a great word? Why don’t we have ointments any more?

Thanks to Radioactive Jam for sparking old memories.

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The Continuing Misfortunes Adventures of Simple Graphics Man ~

#24: Home On The Range.

It was inevitable. When I wasn’t looking, SGM snuck in and untied The Cow. My intuition (and familiarity with SGM’s previous capers) tells me that this is likely to turn out badly.

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Thanks jedimacfan for pointing me to the great font from which this image comes – Interstate Pi Four

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I suppose that you’ve all been on the edge of your seats waiting to find out if Prophet Peter Popoff would manage to find time in his busy schedule to reply to my reply to his missives to me. Well Cow fans, fret not! Last week I had a personal reply from Prophet Pete acknowledging my correspondence!

Well, in a manner of speaking.

Prophet Pete professes to be pleased to hear from me and yet his verbose (now that’s a surprise) response neglects to address any of the topics I raised when I wrote to him. Golly gosh, it’s almost like he didn’t even read my letter!

Prophet Popoff seems to believe that he and I have now developed some kind of special spiritual bonding (even though he doesn’t have a lot of interest in anything I say) and spares no effort to give me the benefit of his irksome and clichéd ‘wisdom’. Somewhere ’round about paragraph 4, though, the tone of his writing changes and he begins to get disturbingly familiar:

In this personal letter I must share certain things with you The Holy Spirit has “revealed” to me.

Uh oh.

This morning, during my prayer time (5.30 am) a powerful anointing came over me as I called your name. As I prayed, God showed me something unusual 3 different times… I FELT A POWERFUL ANOINTING “RELEASED” AND FLOWING BETWEEN US. I don’t have the interpretation yet, but I will.

Well I have an interpretation, but I’m really not going to elaborate because, well, it makes me feel kind of queasy. If it’s all the same to you Prophet Pete, I’d just as soon you didn’t call out my name at 5.30 am in the middle of a powerful flowing, or at the very least, just keep that information to yourself.

Prophet P goes on to tell me of the three visions he’s had for me – three things that God has revealed to him. #1 involves the packing of boxes…

Are you planning some kind of move?

… he asks. My God! The man is psychic! How could he possibly know? Now I’m really paying attention for Vision #2 but it’s just plain boring (and completely wrong). Let’s skip to Vision #3 where we hit paydirt:

Have you been praying for a certain amount of money for something special? Yes ___ No ___ How much? ___

Yes! I have been praying for some money Prophet Pete! How much? Three BILLION DOLLARS! I know, I know, that sounds a little bit greedy, but heck, this is praying, right – may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb! Even more spooky though, I’ve been praying for a pet eagle!

The letter rambles on in the manner I’ve come to expect (excluding, strangely, the underlinings and coloured annotations of previous letters), and after asking for some money Prophet Pete signs off with the usual guff and urges me to write down any unusual dreams. Since he has comprehensively failed to acknowledge my request for details on any dreams he may have had involving a ‘tetherd cow’, I am forced to conclude that he has no real interest at all in my own visions and therefore worth no further attention.

So adios Prophet Peter Popoff. If you want to get any further coverage on Tetherd Cow Ahead you’re going to have to do significant work on your schtick. Of course, if my pet eagle arrives tomorrow with a cheque for, oh, say, a cool billion, I’ll be quite prepared to eat crow.

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*We spell it cheque. You’d best be checking your spelling when in our country, n00b.

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This last week has been an extremely aggravating exciting time here in Sydney, with the city being comprehensively ground to a standstill by the carnival of clowns that is APEC (aka ACROCK). Today we have George Bush, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin slowing down the traffic and stealing the media attention away from more important issues like footballers getting busted for doing drugs.

As APEC has progressed, we’ve been treated to some terrific banter between these great minds of our age (the Leaders, that is, not the footballers. Although, really, there’s not much in it). The press was all over this exchange between George W and John Howard at a barbecue lunch:

George (loads plate up with steak and sausage): I’m a meat man.

John: I think we know that.

Onlookers: Hahahahahaha!

Honestly, I didn’t stop laughing for a full attosecond. And to think they hold Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw up as the finest examples of English language wordsmiths.

Mr Bush said in a speech this morning how much he loved Sydney and that he was hoping to be invited to the ‘OPEC’ summit next year (now was that ever a Freudian slip). It would seem that he thinks APEC is held in Sydney every year. This man is the Leader of the Free World. SpaghettiMonster help us all.

Some of the other fine word manglings I’ve heard this week include annualized, disendorsed and our own Beloved Leader’s stadia (which he evidently thinks is the plural of stadium but it isn’t. It’s a made-up modern word that someone thinks follows the rules of Latin. It doesn’t. A more correct and wholly less pretentious thing to say would be stadiums)

Meanwhile, since International Talk Like a Pirate Day is imminent, and you all know how much I like to get into the swing of things here on The Cow, I propose we start celebrating a little earlier this year and keelhaul the lot of ’em.

Well Acowlytes, this is likely to be our last stop on the Bad Public Art Tour of Sydney, not because I’ve even come close to running out of Bad Art, but because, as I mentioned last post, I’m about to wave goodbye to The Harbour City and take up residence in The Paris of the South where the public art is of a different calibre altogether.

Today we head out west of Sydney toward the Blue Mountains. Have your cameras at the ready, because we’re on the freeway and will be (thankfully) passing this lame effort at speed.

I used to drive past these red poles on my weekly trips to the Treehouse. For months I’d sail on by thinking ‘When are they going to finish those damn things?’.

The poles, painted in garish Road Safety Orange with wires sticking out the top, were obviously some kind of lighting fixtures awaiting a tardy electrician to turn up and complete the job. One day as I sped past the thought entered my head that… ‘Oooooo… they are finished. It’s some kind of artwork!’

And then, chuckling to myself at my silliness… ‘N-o-o-o-o… that couldn’t be right…’

But it was. This is the Light Horse Interchange Sculpture Parade and those poles that look so much like a bunch of safety barricades on a bad hair day are in fact supposed to be symbolic of the horses and men of the Australian Light Horse regiments that served in France and The Middle East in the First World War.

This is how the effort is described on the Westlink M7 website:

Red, the colour of the Flanders poppy and poppies that bloomed throughout Palestine, is symbolic of the blood of supreme sacrifice and is the colour chosen for the sculptural group. The abstract plumage attached to each marker represents the emu plumes attached to the Light Horsemen’s slouch hats. The white band is a reference to the departing soldiers’ innocence of war.

Got that? Let me just rephrase it to clarify:

Crap. Crap. Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap. Crap.

First of all, the colour of the poles is not like any kind of blood I’ve ever seen, though at a stretch I guess you could say there are poppies that colour. Orange poppies. Secondly, the sculptor, whose identity I cannot find anywhere on the web (for obvious reasons, one has to speculate…) has evidently never seen an emu feather because they don’t look anything like bits of electrical wire. And aside from anything at else, the whole effect is just so completely pathetic. There’s no feeling of skill, or deliberation, or elegance, or challenge, or illumination, nor indeed any measure of art at all.

I have a terrible sinking feeling, in fact, that there was no actual decent artist within cooee of this project, but that the bunch that designed the freeway – engineers from the Urban Planning Department of the Roads and Traffic Authority and urban design company Conybeare Morrison – appended a quick sketch for the ‘sculpture’ to the bottom of one of their blueprints for the engineering of the overpass construction.

It would help explain the appalling ‘artistic’ statement that I quoted above. It certainly wasn’t penned by anyone with artistic thoughtfulness because it’s so awful.

In a review in Architecture Australia, General Manager of the New South Wales Government Architects Office, Peter Mould, says of the work:

This is a strong theme for public art, but its execution is disappointing. It is artwork seen in passing, at speed, and calls for a robust scale so that the rhythm of the parade is legible. The feathers, too, are unconvincing.

And that, for me, says it all. It doesn’t even meet the standards of a Government architect.

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Thanks Alicia for Pic#1 and Violet Towne for Pic#2

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