Tetherd Cow Ahead

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’. ((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.)) Let me see: Electromagnetic Pulse? Nope. Killer comet? Nope. Planet X? Nope. Super volcano? Nope. ((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.)) 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. ((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…)) 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, ((You can bet your Nigerian fortune that I’ll be revisiting all these predictions in 2013!)) 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.

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. ((relating to a non-critical matter, you’ll be relieved to know)) 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.

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: ((Her real name. Or at least the one she told me)) 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 a green flashing light 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.

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. ((‘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!))

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.” ((In spite of his disclaimer, he apparently IS speaking on behalf of the Church)).

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. ((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)) 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? ((Where does anyone get this bereft-of-all-evidence idea that having religion in your life gives you any kind of moral superiority?))

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!)