Tetherd Cow Ahead

While we’re on the subject of those with a very tenuous grasp on reality, let me introduce to you the latest invention to hit teh internets: the Magical Technical Remote Viewing Pen from from TRV University.™ Here’s what TRVU promises on their site:

Now you can convert ANY rollerball style pen to operate like a Magic Pen capable of downloading precise and accurate information about the future, the past or anything you want to know — anywhere on the planet.

Well tie me to an anthill and smear my ears with jam! Precise and accurate information at the same time! About anything I want to know, from anywhere or anywhen! Golly TRVU, how the heck does it work??!!

It’s a mind technology called Technical Remote Viewing and anyone can learn this formally top secret skill and for less than a dollar convert an ordinary pen into a magic pen worth millions.

A formally top secret skill! Well, that’s the bomb – who’d want an informal top secret skill?!* So, let me get this straight – I can convert an ordinary pen into a million dollar pen for less than a buck? Sweet! My fortune is made!

Sigh.

Digging through the trash heap that is the TRV Empire unearths several dumpster-loads of similar preposterous idiocy. On TRV ‘News’, for instance, we learn that if you fork out to attend TRV University ‘…you will be trained along with the best and brightest minds on the planet’ (a contention I find highly unlikely) to use your Magic Pen to be able to ‘accurately sketch a nuclear weapon located inside a mountain in China, thousands of miles away’ and ‘probe the mind of Osama bin Laden in real time, uncovering his current intent and next move’. Straight away one can quite clearly see that there are only two options here:

1: There are people out there with a Magic Pen who know where Osama bin Laden is and what he is thinking, but just don’t aim to tell anyone… or…

2: The pen doesn’t work.

It doesn’t require one of the brightest minds on the planet to figure out which of those alternatives is the most likely. This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of claptrap available at TRVU, though. Dane Spotts† from TRV News, a person who claims to be ‘properly trained’ in the use of the Magic Pen, sets us up for a demonstration of how effective the predictions are by choosing as a ‘target’ “The Next Catastrophic Terrorist Attack on US Soil”. But don’t hold your breath for any revelation of something that surely would benefit every single soul in the US‡ – Dane waffles on with some of the most ridiculous baloney for several pages without offering up a single whiff of a result, until, predictably he ends in a promise of ‘all will be revealed when you send us your money’.

Perhaps best of all are the ‘explanatory’ videos hosted by TRV spokeswoman Joni Dourif in which Ms Dourif makes some of the most risible and possibly actionable claims I’ve ever heard.

Here are a couple of the howlers she comes up with:

‘Having the Technical Remote Viewing Certification guarantees you a certain level of credibility amongst… uh… the law enforcements, amongst science and technology – who already know about us by the way’

Uh-huh. I think I know what that ‘certain level’ of credibility is likely to be. And, oh yes, I just bet the law enforcements know about you lot…

There is just an endless variety of options available for you to use this in a career. In science and technology, for example. You don’t need to be a doctor to assist a neurosurgeon…

There are neurosurgeons who consult Remote Viewers? OMFG! Kill me before I get to the operating theatre!

The TRVU site features several videos of Ms Dourif earnestly spouting such ridiculous and worrying nonsense. They are laugh-out-loud funny in places, and in others, stick-your-head-in-the-oven depressing. I am surprised that she can keep a straight face throughout, and I wonder if the many jump-cuts and fades are due to her corpsing her lines.

So how does the Magic Pen really work? Let’s go back to Dane Spotts’ ‘terrorist attack’ demonstration that I mentioned above. After Spotty leads us through some incomprehensible gibberish involving writing down random numbers and ‘prompting the signal line’, we have spent about 45 minutes doodling over a blank stack of Reflex and:

… have produced 30 or more sheets of paper which are covered in words, phrases and drawings, that we can now summarize and create an analysis from. It’s uncanny to see it all come together like some incredible jig saw puzzle; each piece combined to create a complete picture that reveals a solution to our problem. All of this from the tip of a magic pen.

In other words, TRVU is going to show you how to draw some vague predictions out of THIRTY PAGES of random scribbling! The obvious get-out-of-jail-free card here is that the Magic Pen has given you all the right information – if you don’t end up with an accurate prediction of the future it’s not the pen’s fault, it’s that you are a crap Remote Viewer!

As I read further and further through the TRVU sites, I find it harder and harder to convince myself that it’s not all some big joke. So much of it is SO farcical that I really want to believe it’s a giant leg pull. Sadly, it appears not to be the case – TRVU is an actual money-making venture; another shameless scam aimed at lining the pockets of morally bankrupt con-artists by fleecing gullible schmucks.

And I don’t for a moment think that the proprietors of TRVU really believe this rubbish. If there was anything at all to this ‘Remote Viewing’ it seems to be it would be the simplest thing in the world to verify. In fact, here you go, TRVU (or any other Remote Viewing adept) – I offer you up a challenge. I have, sitting on a chest of drawers in my bedroom, a box. Tell me what is in that box. Now I don’t mean thirty pages of guesses – I want an exact description of the contents of the box. You can do it in one short sentence. There should be no equivocating – it’s a very simple answer. This should be a completely trivial task for a graduate of TRVU, and here, in a public forum, you can demonstrate for all the world to see how marvellous your Magic Pen really is.

If you get it right, I promise I’ll buy out your entire stock.

(I will reveal the contents of the box here on The Cow in, oh, say two month’s time…)

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*I figure there’s a sure-fire way to spot pseudoscience even if you don’t know your pendulum from your psychomanteum – just look for the atrocious murdering of the English language in any promotional material. Dead giveaway.

†If you think his name sounds like a joke, you really should read his writing…

‡We must assume that Dane, a self-professed accomplished user of the Pen, actually does know this information but has declined to share it with anyone, for reasons I’d really like to hear.

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It seems that the punchline gag that Violet Towne came up with for my recent comment on the stock market catastrophe is more on the money (heh) than we’d anticipated.

Apparently, the current financial problems besetting the global economy are not the fault of contemptible grasping money-traders at all, but were in fact inevitable, because they were written in the stars! At least that’s what Raj Kumar Sharma, an ‘astro-finance specialist’ in Mumbai is telling everybody, according to this morning’s Melbourne Age. Spouting incomprehensible drivel about Saturn and the Sun ‘not getting along’ and invoking the influence of the ‘shadow’ planet ‘Ketu’ which doesn’t even exist, Sharma attributes the Lehman brothers collapse and the beginning of the fiscal disaster to Saturn and Ketu ‘fighting like dragons’.

Using impenetrable logic, he rationalizes the effects of distant astronomical bodies on our fortunes thus:

“You cannot avoid the coolness of the moon or the heat of the sun. And if you cannot avoid heat and cold, you cannot avoid the influence of Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury or Venus.”

No wonder there’s an economic fiasco taking place if people are using this kind of hooey to guide their investment strategies.

Elsewhere in India, astrologer Christopher Kevill, who writes a financial astrology column for India’s Daily News and Analysis, agrees with Sharma that movements of remote astronomical bodies predicted the fiscal turbulence. Invoking the influence of ‘Rahu’ (another entirely fictional planet) and its ‘150 degree relationship to Saturn’ as the cause of the market calamity, he condescendingly prevaricates with the qualification that:“It’s a lot more complicated than that but that’s one layer of explanation.”

The really amusing thing is that anybody at all in India lost money on the markets with these incisive augurs on the scene.

So, what do they see for the resolution of all this kerfuffle, then? What should we do with our money? According to Sharma, Venus is entering Libra, and that means stability and recovery, so all is dandy. Kevill, on the other hand, says the rallies will fizzle quickly with the markets slumping at 50 percent lower than current levels by 2010. Both of them agree that the turmoil will continue for some years.

Let me simplify – that’s a safe guess for the short term with a bet each way for the outcome.

My advice for the your pecuniary future? Invest in the exploitation of gullible chumps. That’s an industry that’s never going to tank.

It warms the cockles of my heart* to know that Cow Readers are ever-vigilant for tidbits to whet my whistle†. JR sent me the above flyer which was popped through his door recently by some vagrant evidently disenfranchised from the Land of Normal Thinking.

Let’s deconstruct it, shall we?

•IS EVOLUTION PART OF SCIENCE OR IS IT A TAX SUPPORTED RELIGION?

Given the tone of the nonsense that follows, this is probably meant to be a rhetorical question. Sadly for the person who wrote it, evolution is, in fact, part of science. A tax-supported religion is something like Catholicism or Scientology or Mormonism or just about any other whacky belief system that calls itself a religion. Governments seem to be real happy about allowing those kinds of organizations to accumulate cash and avoid their social financial responsibilities. Calling yourself an Evolutionist, on the other hand, doesn’t attract any tax benefits. Trust me – if there was even the remotest chance of that, I’d have the certificate.

•HAS EVOLUTION EVER AIDED MAN IN TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT AND PROGRESSION?

Well, duh, yes. That’s why we’re not in still in caves hiding from Big Noise and Light That Come From Sky When Gods Make With Much Falling Water. You idiot.

•WHAT ARE THE FRUITS OF EVOLUTION?

Well, I really want to say ‘bananas’ here but that would just be flippant wouldn’t it? What do you mean by that you loon? It’s a question that defies any sense whatsoever. I couldn’t make up a stupider question if I spent a month trying.

•WHAT ROLE HAS IT PLAYED THROUGH RECENT CENTURIES AND WHAT ROLE DOES IT PLAY TODAY?

You really are a halfwit, aren’t you. Evolution plays the ‘role’ of having gotten us where we are. Maybe you think it would do better playing the role of Hamlet? Or Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror? And ‘recent centuries‘? Hello? Missing the point bigtime there fella.

ALL QUESTIONS ARE ANSWERED! ALL SIDES ARE SHOWN AND EXPLAINED THOROUGHLY AND FUNDEMENTALLY SUPPORTING MUCH EVIDENCE.

AND ALL IN CAPITALS WITH SPELLING MISTAKES AND NONSENSICAL SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION!

KENT HOVIND, A SCIENCE TEACHER AND A BIOLOGIST WITH A DEGREE IN PHD AND OTHER AREAS OF QUALIFICATION

Hmmm. A degree in PHD. That either makes no sense at all (surprise!) or possibly stands for ‘Phony Historical Dissertations’ or maybe ‘Preposterous Hysterical Diatribes’, seeing as Kent Hovind, a well-known Creationist, knows as much about science as George Bush knows about, er, science. As for ‘other areas of qualification’, well sure, if you accept a Bachelor of Religious Education from a non-accredited college, or a ‘Master’s’ Degree in Christian Education gained via a correspondence course as qualifications. I guess they could be considered ‘areas’ of qualification. As in, “Yeah, they’re in the general area, but not actually qualifications.” Of course, anyone with actual qualifications that meant anything could just say what they were.

– IS A FEARED OPPONENT IN DEBATES, AND YOU WILL KNOW WHY

Well, that’s true, anyway. He’s a feared opponent in debates because he’s a pig-headed close-minded bible literalist of dubious (if any) intellect, with a track record of making ridiculous and unsupportable claims. Richard Dawkins, a well-known champion of evolution, refuses to debate people like Kent Hovind because, really, who could be bothered? It’s not so much a fear of losing the debate, as a fear of losing your sanity.

Oh I can’t go on. Suffice to say that if you did waste valuable time visiting Kent Hovind’s ‘Dr Dino’ site, you would not get an explanation of ’60+ Hours of Science’ so much as an irritating spew of biblical silliness. How Atlantis quite fits in there I’m not sure, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least that it’s included. They probably have stuff on UFOs and unicorns too.

As for the promise that ‘you won’t be dissappointed‘, well, aside from the fact that you might be dissappointed by the awful spelling, you certainly won’t be dissappointed if you’re looking for more of the kind of claptrap that the flyer spruiks. There’s LOTS of that.

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*What does that actually mean, ‘cockles’? Since when did you ever hear a doctor talking about your heart cockles? “I’m sorry Mr Smith, but it seems you have near-frozen heart cockles and we’ll have to operate”.

†And what the heck does that mean, too?

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These are the Scientology offices in Russell St, Melbourne. Whenever I walk past, I look in and often see the inhabitants industriously doing things. Some of these things make sense to me, like putting files in cabinets and drinking out of coffee cups. Other things seem odd and miserable, like the big bunch of sad-but-earnest-looking people listening to a guy talk while he points at a chart with diagrams like something out of a 1950s science fiction film. Or the young and impressionable kids barely out of school, filling in the ludicrous Scientology ‘Personality Tests’.*

Not so long back, Violet Towne, as part of her job†, was taking photographs in this general area, and some of the sad-but-earnest-looking people came out of the building and in a very paranoid manner demanded to know what was going on. One woman kind of just ‘stood’ wherever VT and her colleagues went, saying nothing, gazing blankly ahead of herself and exerting some kind of invisible unpleasantness. It was not what any sane person would consider normal behaviour. This building is in a very public place and VT & Co were well withing their legal rights to be doing what they were doing (which had absolutely nothing to do with Scientology, until the Scientologists appeared).

Quite coincidentally, later on the very same day as I took this photograph (Saturday July 12, 2008), the Melbourne Chapter of the anti-Scientology group Anonymous staged a protest outside the building.

I wonder if they got any pictures exactly like mine?

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*My use of quotes in this case (and in the image if you picked it up), is to indicate sarcasm. Unlike the perpetrators of last post’s efforts, I actually know how punctuation is supposed to work.

†I’ll leave that with you for speculation… suffice to say it’s not something that you or I would find in the least peculiar, offensive or even slightly unusual.

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Now that pretty much everything you can imagine has been turned into a movie monster, from the recombined pieces of corpses through cars, atmospheric moisture, dolls, dogs and dinosaurs, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, director of such memorable moving pictures as, well, OK, only The Sixth Sense, has turned, for his latest effort, to that ultimate Creature of the Night: the larch. Yes folks, I’m giving away the plot. In his new film, The Happening, the trees did it.

You will recall that some time ago I wrote that I wasn’t going to get into the habit of reviewing movies here on The Cow unless they were very very special movies…? Well, this is a very very special movie. Oh yes – ‘special’ in the way we used to be told to refer to the kids with learning disabilities in school.

Like Danny Boyle’s execrable Sunshine, Shyamalan’s The Happening commits the Number 1 Crime of science fiction; it is dumb. And, as if it’s trying to get one up on Sunshine, it also commits the Number 1 Crime of movies-in-general: it is boring. This film is dumb and boring. And annoying.† About twenty minutes into The Happening I contemplated emulating one of the film’s pheromone-addled humans and seeing if I could stuff enough popcorn up my nostrils to kill myself.

The story begins with a relatively intriguing stage-setting sequence in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park where a young woman begins babbling incoherently to a friend and then meticulously removes a chopstick-sized hairpin from her hair and inexplicably plunges it into her jugular. Other people around the park seem bewildered and disoriented, and screams echo from somewhere in the distance. Elsewhere in the city, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlburg) a science teacher in a local high school, is enquiring of his class if they’ve ever heard of Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (a mysterious catastrophe that is, in actual fact, devastating honey bee colonies in the USA) and asking the students to put forth some explanations for this baffling phenomenon. The first kid to come up with a suggestion – “Some kind of disease?” – is in all probability right on the money, but this does not deter M. Night, via Marky Mark, from plunging headlong into the ridiculous.* Nope, Colony Collapse Disorder is nothing we could ever imagine: “It is,” pontificates Elliot weightily, “An Unexplained Act of Nature!™”

This scene, so very early in the piece, is an alarm bell that presages a series of inane pop-science clichés and baseless myths that will form the framework of the film. As Elliot strides around his classroom, attempting lamely to be Cool Mr Science Geek, all I could think was “Well, if American science teachers are anything like this, I now completely understand the success of the Intelligent Design movement in US schools”. It is true that Colony Collapse Disorder is perplexing and unexplained, but SO WHAT? Lots of things are perplexing and unexplained. Shyamalan quite obviously wants us to think that in this case it means that science is, somehow, inadequate for the job of providing any interpretation of CCD, and that is w-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o… SPOOKY!!!. Spare me.

It’s a real shame, because the premise of the film – that plants might evolve to react to humans as a threat, and consequently take measures to eliminate them – is actually reasonably original, The Day of the Triffids notwithstanding. It even has some slight basis in the natural world. It’s the kind of thing that a writer with more skill might have made into a decent yarn.

Meanwhile, in the picture’s only truly unsettling sequence, across town a bunch of construction workers start throwing themselves off the top of a building. It appears that the city is suffering some kind of mysterious pandemic (which in the paranoid US lexicon automatically means ‘an attack by terrorists’). It’s about here that the film turns rapidly brainless. And never recovers. News reports inform us that some kind of airborne agent is causing people in the city area to kill themselves. Early warning signs of contamination are confused behaviour and incoherent speech. The teachers in Elliot’s school are told to send their kids home and lay low. Elliot and his teacher pal Julian (John Leguizamo) decide to grab their families and head out of town.

We are next introduced to Elliot’s wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) who appears from the very start to have been affected by the terrorist mind chemical, but as it turns out, that’s just her acting style and/or the witless script. Elliot calls by to collect her and they head off by train with Julian and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) in tow.

The train gets stopped in Nowhereseville USA, and after what seems like an interminable series of explanatory scenes, Elliot & Co manage to hitch a lift with a goofy guy and his wife who are some sort of horticulturalists. Goofy Guy is the first to offer the idea that maybe the source of the mysterious toxin which is affecting the humans comes from trees. On the way to a place that the group has perceived as ‘safe’ (Wha? Did anyone else understand how these fruitcakes decided this?) they stop by Goofy Guy’s greenhouse where we discover that he has a penchant for hotdogs (what the crap was that about?) and that he talks to his plants (and plays music to them).

“They respond to human voices!” he exclaims, rolling his buggy eyes around, “It’s a scientific fact!” And suddenly I see what he’s getting at – by now it is plain that the performances from the plants in this film are considerably less wooden than those of the actors, and this could be readily explained if you care to speculate that maybe M. Night Shyamalan spent more time on the set talking to the trees than to the people. Seriously. The dialogue and the acting in this picture must conspire to be some of the worst to hit the screen since Robot Monster or Plan Nine From Outer Space. Let me give you an example:

Elliot (talking about Goofy Guy’s theory that the trees are responsible): Maybe that guy was right…
Alma: What do you mean?
Elliot: I don’t know.

That’s the only one I can remember verbatim, but there are dozens of these kinds of clunkers. Mark Wahlburg, who is usually quite capable of turning in a reasonable performance, seems to spend most of the picture barely keeping the effect of the mind-altering plant toxins at bay. He stumbles around the countryside (and the film in general), as the ad hoc ‘leader’ of his little group, like a clueless boy scout about to fail his orienteering badge. In one memorable and quite absurd sequence he shouts over and over “Give me a second! Just give me a second! Why don’t you give me a second to think?! Just give me a second!!!”

All of which takes up more than a few seconds of his thinking time, but gives the audience plenty of time to think that they should have gone next door to see Kung Fu Panda. What Marky Mark comes up with in his thinking time is the brilliant strategy that the group should try and outrun the wind. I’m not kidding. This guy teaches science.

I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow of the rest of the story.‡ And it truly is boring. Just imagine a confused road movie with panicked groups of people driving around the bucolic Pennsylvania landscape stumbling alternately across corpses and unhinged-people-who-will-eventually-become-corpses. When one victim throws himself under an industrial lawn-mower I was right there with him.

It’s hard to believe that a film can be quite this awful. With the vacuous substitution of scene changes and spectacle (in the form of shock-tactic suicides) for plot, and mawkish sentimentality for emotion, the movie plays to the dimmest of the dim. It mixes up scientific fact and the truth about natural events with hokum and nonsense in a mad mélange of glib throwaway hippie philosophy and post Cold War paranoid hysteria. It’s like Walt Whitman rewrote The Day of the Triffids after watching What the Bleep Do We Know? On crack. And, inexcusably these days for a science fiction film, it perpetuates the idea that scientists are either mad or bumbling, and that science itself is clueless and ineffectual. Or evil. These things are bad enough, but unbelievably, it’s even worse than just that. At times during the film Shyamalan seems not to know whether he is making a sci-fi thriller or a comedy. A bizarre scene with Elliot talking to a house plant is played, confusingly, first for tension then for laughs. In the cinema where I saw The Happening, the audience was laughing at, not with. Portmanteaus of people committing suicide in bizarre ways (a guy offering his limbs to lions in the zoo; the man lying in front of the lawn mower) are so blackly humourous that it’s hard to believe Shyamalan was oblivious to the effect they might have on the audience. If he was aware of this, one is forced to ask the question: “Why? What the heck is he getting at?” Sequences which I presume are intended to be symbolic and ‘meaningful’ (the Exhibition home with its fake sushi plates and prop wine glasses; the solitary ‘Earth Mother’ in her isolated homestead; the lame horror feint involving a rope-swing on a creaky branch) are flat and stupid and go nowhere.††

And the obligatory Shyamalan ‘twist’ ending, so obvious and soporific that it would have been rejected from the lamest episode of The Twilight Zone, is made even worse by ringing loud with a cinematic “Tsk tsk tsk: you humans don’t know nuthin’!”

As I said at the outset, M.Night Shyamalan’s The Happening is a movie with learning disabilities; it is to the science fiction oeuvre what Basil Fawlty is to the hospitality industry: an uncoordinated, unlikeable, nonsensical caricature that is a peerless example of what not to do if you at all concerned about pleasing your customers.

Did I mention it was dumb?

Right.

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*”Good theory Timmy,” says Marky Mark, metaphorically tousling the kid’s hair, “But it doesn’t explain why it’s happening everywhere at once!” No it doesn’t. That’s because, in all likelihood, Colony Collapse Disorder had already spread widely before it was noticed. It’s distinctly probable that it’s happening ‘everywhere at once’ in the same way as, say, AIDS is happening everywhere at once if you examine it right now. It does not mean that it didn’t start somewhere. Read about CCD here and get some understanding of how science is actually approaching this problem. (One is forced to conjecture that for a person writing about a phenomenon of nature and science and offering it up dressed in the robes of plausibility, M. Night Shyamalan was actually not terribly concerned with those pesky things like facts…)

†The film is peppered with scenes of people committing suicide in graphic and novel ways. It is the filmic equivalent of someone poking you every time you’re just about to doze off to a nice comfy sleep.

‡And there are SO many risible scenes to choose from: such as when Elliot confronts the train guards about why they’ve stopped in some remote town:

††If you want to see a movie about what an inexplicable event like this would be really like if it happened, try Michael Haneke’s Wolfzeit (The Time of the Wolf). I guarantee you won’t leave that film laughing.

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Whilst browsing the Rogues Gallery recently, I learned of a newly available product that I know is going to greatly interest all Cow readers: Roland-Deese Productions’ Ghost In A Bottle.

Yes, Cowpokes, for forking out a mere $US20.00 you too can have a bottle containing a ‘ghost’ ‘captured from a reported haunted establishment, (house, hotel, ship, cemetery, etc), by our Ghost Hunters’.

“But Reverend,” I hear you cry, “There are so many crooks, thieves and swindlers out in the wide world! How can I be sure that I’m getting a real ghost in my bottle?! What’s to stop Roland-Deese Productions from selling me some cheap empty bottle and merely saying there’s a ghost in it?”

Well, Cowmrades, you can be sure you’re getting the Real Deal because along with your bottle-imprisoned-ghost you get a ‘Ghost Certificate’ which is signed by the Ghost Hunter that has ‘captured’ the ghost! In addition, the bottle (‘Sealed for Your Protection*: WE CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY MISFORTUNE TO BEFALL YOU SHOULD YOU TAKE POSSESSION OF THIS OBJECT’) comes with a List of Dire Warnings of Hideous Things that Might Happen if you open your bottle, like, oh, ‘your car keys might go missing…’ or ‘you might smell an unfamiliar cologne or perfume…’. Roland-Deese Productions would surely not just make things like that up!

Indeed, as Murray, of Apple Valley, California says in the testimonials:

Just like your instructions advised, I beleive I have seen all signs of my ghost. I’m thinking of moving out of my apartment, it’s now haunted. The Ghost Bottle is a very entertaining novelty!

It would appear that Murray’s ghost isn’t so much haunting him out of his apartment, as entertaining him out! One can only speculate as to whose spirit he got.

Not only might something from the long list of Warnings happen to you, should you open your Ghost Bottle, but Roland-Deese further advises that ‘You may experience other Ghostly situations not stated above.’ I guess that would cover:

• Hideous face deformation and body contortions
• Having your soul sucked out through your mouth
• Attacks by swarms of flies
• The desire to throw yourself out a thirteenth floor window
• Getting sucked into the TV

…and all the other things that ghosts really† do that the purveyors of the Ghost Bottles are not keen to detail in their list, for some reason. Of course, Roland-Deese Productions Ghost Hunters are professionals and therefore in no danger themselves when they bottle their wraiths:

There is a special technology that takes place when our Ghost Hunting professionals capture the Ghosts.

That special technology is of course called Bullshit™ and is used extensively throughout the world of ‘psychic’ commerce.

All that being said, faithful Acowlytes, it will probably come as no surprise to you that agents‡ for TCA Enterprises, ever on the lookout for a new marketing opportunity, have come up with an even better idea than a Ghost in Bottle: a Ghost SHIP in a Bottle!

(Sorry folks. No matter how hard I try, I simply can’t present you with artwork as terrible as the Ghost in a Bottle site)

Yes, that’s right! Selected readers of Tetherd Cow Ahead are eligible†† for their very own highly collectible Fantom Frigate in a Flagon! Using genuine naval ectoplasm,‡‡ TCA artisans have lovingly crafted exact replicas of your favourite mystery ships, including the Andrea Doria, the Octavius, the Flying Dutchman and the Mary Celeste, had them cursed by Certified African Witchdoctors** and then stuck in a jar. Of course, that’s exactly where you should leave them, because, should you open your Fantom Frigate Flagon, you may experience:

• Flooded drains
• Shortages of rum in the liquor cabinet
• ‘Mysterious’ parrot droppings around the house
• Unexplained attacks of scurvy
• Voices singing sea-shanties in another room
• Huge splintered wooden holes in your walls
• ‘Salty’ tasting coffee
• Other things not stated above that might be associated with ghost ships, or the sea, or pirates, or water, or films about ghost ships, or salt beef, or smuggling, or gold doubloons, or films about water, or wooden legs, or Moby Dick, or the moon on a cloudy night. Etc.

And remember, when you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and a water-logged, rag-draped skeleton leaps out of your bathtub and lunges at you with a rusty sabre – make sure you have a good ol’ chuckle. After all, it’s just entertainment…

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*The bottle is sealed with wax, for Pete’s sake. What kind of third-rate spook is going to let a little glob of red wax get in the way of eating your brains?

†They don’t really do those things. Ghosts don’t exist. In case you were, like, taking me seriously or anything.

‡I shamelessly stole this idea from Jim Shaver over at Rogues Gallery, Thanks Jim!

††Bribes Conditions apply.

‡‡Spiritualism joke.

**From Nigeria. It wasn’t at all difficult to find experts there in the ‘special technology’ that Roland-Deese uses.

★A special thanks to Ralph Elzholz at Virtual Room for the Schooner model.

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