My dear Acowlytes! I apologize for my somewhat lengthy absence of late. My excuse, I think, is a pretty good one – Violet Towne and I were married in a simple and, I like to think, moving ceremony a few weekends back. There was much carousing with friends and family and I believe that a good time was had by all (certainly from my perspective anyway). Since then there has been a bit of holidaying and not a lot of sitting at computers, and hence an almost complete lack of Cow.
Not that The Cow was ever far from my thoughts as we trekked around the southern coast of Victoria on our honeymoon. Simple Graphics Man was up to his old tricks at many of our stops, and there were some great photo opportunities which I’ll share with you in due course.
And there was Scientology. Yes, no matter where you go, the lunatics will find some way to reach into your life. I’ve been meaning to do a Scientology piece for a little while now, and whilst this will not be it, I must share with you my thoughts on the recent Tom Cruise embarrassment that managed to filter into my attention as I was waiting in the queue in a great little fish & chip shop in the coastal town of Apollo Bay.
If you didn’t manage to catch it, seriously, go take a look. The Tomster could have done no worse if he’d put on a clown suit and declared himself the reincarnation of Bozo.
It wasn’t till I arrived home and scrutinized the video on YouTube that I realised how much in the error of my ways I was. I think that I have been mistaken all this time… Tom Cruise, and Scientology itself, are actually in the service of The Cow! Scoff not, faithful Cowpokes! I didn’t spot it immediately either…
OMG!!! I immediately searched for other clues that Tom and his Thetan-zapping buddies might be doing the Work of the Church of the Tetherd Cow. Well, for a start, there is the excellent science-fiction art-direction…
…persuasive evidence in itself. But if there was truly any Cow agenda operating well it might manifest itself in, oh, a wedding ceremony, say. Is there, maybe, a Scientology Wedding ceremony?
Aha! There is! Scrolling down through the incomprehensible juvenile drivel lengthy ritual that Katie and Tom presumably endured when they got hitched, we uncover the following poignant observation:
Now, (groom’s name),
girls need clothes
And food and
Tender happiness and frills
A pan, a comb,
perhaps a cat
All caprice if you will
But still
They need them.
Do you then
Provide?
Do you?†
“Perhaps a cat”!!!!!???? Scientology requires the Groom to provide a cat? Whoa! Need I draw anyone a picture?! Violet Towne is such a lucky girl.
Tom Cruise, for actions undercover in the service of The Cow, we salute you!
Oh for Pete’s sake. Another nutcase has found ‘an image of the Virgin’ on a tortillasandwichcinnamon bunfencepostpizza panunderpass pebble.
The Holy Pebble was found on a beach in New Zealand by a woman who had ‘an awesome run of luck’ after picking it up. Evidently the awesome run of luck wasn’t permanent since she’s put the Sacred Item up for online auction. Twice. The first time, the winning bid was a hoax. Dang. A hoax! Some people will do anything!
Unbelievably, for Round Two, there are as of this writing, already bids of many thousands of dollars.
A New Zealand Catholic Church spokesperson said the church was ‘cautious’ about responding to claims of holy images of the Virgin Mary, because many turned out to be fakes.
Smack me with a plank from the True Cross! Fakes? No way!
Thing is, you have to be pretty careful when it comes to seeing likenesses in patterns on pebbles. Look at it one way and some might see The Virgin but flip the picture upside down you’ll get an idea of exactly what kind of forces this woman is really messing with.
Hello and welcome. Today we begin a new series here on The Cow – an examination of some of the, er, more unusual beliefs held by human beings. I’m not talking about your common garden-variety misapprehensions like homeopathy or free energy, but the real The-World-Is-Flat/Aliens-Are-Among-Us delusions of certified fruitcakes. And to show some impartiality I’m not even going to go straight for the easy pickings of American loonies, but instead start with an Australian.
Jasmuheen believes (or she says she believes – these are two very different things…) that she doesn’t need to eat any food or drink any water to survive. At all. Ever. In scientific terms, this qualifies her as an idiot.
Breatharians like Jasmuheen say that instead of consuming the nutrients that our species has needed for several hundreds of thousands of years, they are instead able to live on a mystical energy called prana, a Sanskrit term that refers to a kind of ‘life-force’. Indeed, many Breatharians assert that they can bypass prana entirely and live exclusively on sunlight. Well, why not, eh? Plants can do it. Jasmuheen herself has written a book called Living on Light: A Source of Nutrition for the New Millennium in which she outlines a 21 day program that will stop your body from aging and allow you to achieve immortality by living solely on light.
I can hear what you’re saying: if Breatharians live only on sunlight, how do you tell one from a philodendron? Well, effectively, you can’t. Certainly they are the intellectual equivalents of philodendrons. They also typically exhibit a greenish skin colour after several weeks without food or water.
Jasmuheen, or Ellen Greve as her name appears on her income tax file, runs an organisation known as the CIA. Hahahaha! No, young fella, sit down there, it’s not the Central Intelligence Agency of the good ol’ US of A (even though that would explain a lot) but the Cosmic Internet Academy!!! (WARNING: SANITY-SAPPING RAINBOW ALERT if you click on that link). Taking a quick spin ’round the CIA website we can find, among other things, information on Interdimensional Field Science, handy facts about Divine Nutrition Research, and Breatharian suggestions for ‘eradicating world health & hunger challenges’ [sic]. Well of course! Just let poor people eat air!!! Problem solved! Doh! How the hell could we have missed that!
Here you can also see (and purchase, should you, for some reason, take complete leave of your senses) Jasmuheen’s ‘art’. You can even experience her incomprehensible babbling pearls of wisdom directly via one her her many YouTube appearances, such as this one:
If you’ve bothered to endure that video, here are some things you might like to ponder:
• In the interview, there is a jug of water on the table in front of Jasmuheen – who is it for?
• There is a some kind of palm tree behind Jasmuheen – is it my imagination, or does she seem agitated that it is hogging all the light?
• After listening to what Jasmuheen has to say, who do you think would make the more formidable Scrabble opponent – her or the palm tree?
In 1999, the Australian version of 60 Minutesput Jasmuheen’s claims to the test under controlled conditions. After Jasmuheen had fasted for four days the experiment was terminated on the advice of Dr. Berris Wink, president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, who was monitoring her vital signs. In the doctor’s professional opinion, Ellen Greve was in danger of dehydration and kidney failure if she went any longer without water.
Jasmuheen, on the other hand, says that ‘60 Minutes stopped the experiment after 5 days ((In the manner of such charlatans, she is quite prepared to distort the statistics to make her feat seem more impressive.)) fearing I would be successful which could create problems for them as their intention was always to portray me as deluded…’ ((Interestingly, this claim has been removed from Jasmuheen’s main website, but you can read the cache here.))
In addition to the absurd beliefs that you’ve read so far, Jasmuheen further contends that due to her pranic sustenance her DNA has somehow altered from the standard two strands usual in all living things, to twelve, and now her body is able to ‘take up extra hydrogen’. ((Even if this nonsensical assertion had any merit, she has nowhere elaborated on why any of this should be desirable. Further, she has declined to allow a blood test to definitively settle this claim, saying: ‘I don’t know what the relevance for it (the blood test) is.’)) Also, in her capacity as ‘an Interdimensional Field Scientist’, she writes that ‘crop circles have always represented a Sacred Geometric Language that is designed to trigger various reactions and awakenings among various people’.
So to recap, Jasmuheen:
• Says she lives on solely on sunlight;
• Claims her DNA is different to all other living things;
• Believes that crop circles are alien messages;
Hmmm. Difficult to understand how anyone could perceive her as deluded.
Anyway, should you somehow receive an invitation from Jasmuheen to attend a Breatharian party, my suggestion is that you eat beforehand, because you know that all she’s likely to offer up in the way of refreshments is a light snack.
Trendhunter is carrying a story about a fashion show that was recently staged by Diesel for their 2008 Spring/Summer Collection. They lead with the headline Holographic Fashion Show – Diesel’s Fashion Show Adds New Dimension and breathlessly claim (undoubtedly cribbing from the Diesel press release) that this it ‘the first time that holograms have been projected along a traditional catwalk’.
Dear oh dear. It looks like the Reverend is obliged once more to step into the fray with his Big Stick of Reason and bash a few heads with it.
The Claim: That this runway show is using some fancy-schmancy system to make holograms of digitally created underwater creatures swirl around and ‘interact’ with the models.
The Implication: That you will see fully realised holographic 3D images floating in ‘thin air’.
The Actuality: The system being used is a simple theatrical trick more than a century old, even if it does use some clever hi-tech riffs. It is not holography.
For starters, this isn’t even the first time that a fashion show has used this particular technique on the catwalk, so Diesel’s trumpeting of this great new idea is a tad overblown. Last year in August, an Alexander McQueen show conjured a ‘holographic’ Kate Moss as the finale to their fashion spectacular. It was done pretty much the same way as this effort, although on a smaller scale.
Here’s a vid of the Diesel presentation from YouTube. You only need to watch a bit of it to get the idea.
Now, I want to say at the outset that I don’t aim to diminish the achievements of the clever technical people and artists behind this show. The effect they have created is pretty cool, for what it actually is. Which is not anything to do with holograms.
The trick they are using here is a variation of an old stage illusion called Pepper’s Ghost. If you have been to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion you have seen this effect in the Ghostly Ballroom.
There’s a very comprehensive explanation of the Pepper’s Ghost illusion at Wikipedia, but it’s an easy enough idea to understand. Have you ever stood in front of a window at night, and looked outside into the lit street and seen your reflection superimposed over the view? That’s how Pepper’s Ghost works.
In the classic method the audience in a theatre is looking through an angled piece of glass at a dimly-lit stage. The glass is unlit, and therefore completely invisible. In the wings of the stage is a blacked out area with lights that can be dimmed. An actor dressed in light-coloured clothing stands here waiting in the dark, and when the lights come up, the audience sees a full-sized transparent ghostly apparition in front of their eyes, apparently right on the stage (it is a reflection, in the glass, of the now illuminated off-stage actor). The actor can move within the confines of the off-stage black set, and even interact with onstage characters with some minimal preparatory choreography. If you don’t know what you’re seeing, it’s a pretty neat effect.*
The Diesel show isn’t using exactly this technique. My guess is that it exploits a combination of the Pepper’s Ghost principle and the use of a synchronised video projection system on screens below and right along each side of the stage.
This is how I think it works: look closely at the runway in the Diesel show. You can just see a hazy barrier that runs all the way along the stage between the audience and the models. I’m guessing that it’s some kind of glass, or perspex or possibly plastic film. Something clear and reflective. It would have been humungously expensive and a real bitch to set up. It’s angled from the floor at the side of the runway over the heads of the audience. The makers of the illusion boast that it’s the first time that this kind of illusion could be seen from both sides of the catwalk at once – that would be impossible using the conventional Pepper’s Ghost with just one piece of glass. I think therefore, that there are probably two reflection panes, and if you look even more carefully at the YouTube vid you can see a thin line at the top of the heads of the models that is probably the edge of the pane on the other side of the catwalk, conducting a little bit of internal reflection inside the glass. Note that this thin blue line is behind the models, and all the other images are in front of them. Having two panes of reflection would require two synchronous video projections, one on either side of the runway†. Because of the properties of this kind of reflection, the audience only sees an image on their own side, and not the one on the opposite side. Optically, the projected images would appear to be the same distance from the glass pane as the pane is from the projection screen. Probably in this case, the floating creatures would seem to occupy centre stage with the models.
The projection equipment and the screens are lower than the audience (maybe some of it is under the runway) and hidden by barriers that run all the way along the sides of the stage. The models can ‘interact’ with the images because they can in all likelihood see the projection screens down the right and left of the catwalk at their feet.
Here – I made a little animation that shows how it could be achieved:
The projected image is mostly likely corrected for the distortion of the slanted screens (unlike my example) and despite the claims of viZoo, who invented the technology‡, I don’t for a moment buy the idea that the image you are seeing is 3D. It might be a 2D projection of a rendered 3D object, but it is not 3 dimensional looking in the way that a real projected moving hologram would be (if you could actually do such a thing, which you can’t).
It’s a really, really clever piece of wizardry, for sure, but it isn’t done with holograms. And it reminds us that some of the best ideas are the very simplest.
Oh, and the clothes? No, I didn’t notice them either.
*I once saw the technique used in a Star Trek show at Universal Studios where members of the audience were dematerialized in the Enterprise ‘transporter room’. It was a marvellous effect and I was so unprepared for it that I was completely flummoxed for a second or two.
†Or, perhaps, some kind of prismatic image splitter on each projector to make two identical images, one for each side.
‡And who, incidentally, never once claim on their site that their system creates holograms.
I was browsing over at Nurse Myra’s this morning and on following one of her links discovered a sterling example of one of my all-time pet peeves: The Meaningless Scientific Diagram.
I’m sure you know the kind of thing – you’ve almost certainly seen it in those TV commercials for washing powder where a personage in white coat is telling you all about the ‘scientific’ basis for how the stuff gets your shirts whiter than white. Sooner or later, up comes a graphical ‘explanation’ of the virtues of the product. It usually involves arrows, a dumb, proprietary, vaguely scientific name like HydroLux or OxyFizz, and a formula.
And it always means absolutely nothing.
In this particular case it was a website for a product from ‘St Herb’ called Nano Breast Cream. Don’t panic ladies – it’s not a cream for causing your endowments to shrink to sub-molecular size, but in fact uses the miracle of nanoparticles to do exactly the opposite! Aside from ‘protecting your breasts from free radicals and visible cleavage*’ it enhances your bust from 1 to 3 cup sizes! Marvellous!
And this is how it works:
I don’t know about you, but one look at that diagram and I’m entirely confused convinced!
Elsewhere on the wonderful St Herb‡ site there is some explanation of the difference between liposomes and nanosomes with further visual aids:
I like this kind of diagram much better than the earlier one. I don’t know what the heck it’s saying about lipo or nano anything, but it is a striking endorsement of visible cleavage.
For a particularly good laugh, take a look at the instructions for how to apply Nano Breast Cream. Pay special attention to Frame 1 – I think she has a volunteer to help with the experiment!
Girls, I’m willing to wager that once you find yourself in the situation of having a friend towel your breasts dry, the issue of size is merely academic. I probably don’t need to draw you a diagram.
*These are very puzzling claims. I don’t know of any research that indicates that free radicals are a detriment to breasts. Maybe they mean the kind of radicals that you get in university pubs? They can be a bit free and grabby after a few drinks. And then there’s the visible cleavage problem. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that some girls actually go out of their way to create visible cleavage.
‡St Herb. Ahhhh. Doesn’t that name just fill you with reassuring friendly naturalness! Either that or it conjures up an image of dirty old man called Herbert who is thinking anything but saintly thoughts about massaging women’s chests.
