Tetherd Cow Ahead

Every now and then on The Cow, we are pleased to introduce you to new technical wonders that will revolutionize some aspect of your undoubtedly humdrum and dreary lives.

Now, following in the footsteps of marvels such as the Cowlexâ„¢ Vibrator, The Unusual Thing, The Non-Electric Machine, X-Fi, The Vegetarian Chicken Modeling Machine and The Cellular Squirrel, The Tetherd Cow Ahead Bureau of Innovation is pleased to present: PWB Special One Drop Liquid.

Here, let the inventors of this astonishing product tell you about it in their own words (directly from the press release, no editing, in the order it is printed):

Special One Drop Liquid possesses a most extraordinary property. The human senses, in common with the requirements of all living material including trees and all other green plants, have evolved the requirements for forward facing light energy.

Got that? Forward facing light energy. Well I’ll be damned. I’ve evolved it, and I don’t even know what it means.

Light, in common with most energies within Nature, readily forms an inverse pattern of itself when encountering an obstacle.

Like this: LIGHT -> OBSTACLE -> THGIL

Couldn’t be plainer. Go on…

Light is particularly modified when encountering a transparent obstacle. The human senses will not function correctly when confronted with an energy pattern which faces away from the senses.

I find that myself, certainly. It explains exactly why they put those little coloured stickers on fresh fruit and, at last, why the swallows always return to Capistrano.

The daily dietary requirement of salt and sugar is the chemical requirement that the body requires to manipulate the energy patterns absorbed by our bodies. To demonstrate the inverse pattern formation on objects which fill the modern environment, simply place salt on one face and sugar on another face of the object. Stimulate your sense of hearing by listening to music, then remove the salt and sugar. The effect on the senses is usually quite profound.

The effect of trying to comprehend the preceding paragraph is profound every time I read it. I get little pinging noises in my brain. It’s like being confronted with an energy pattern that faces away from the senses.

The effect is particularly noticeable if the faces of a NON playing Compact Disc or vinyl record is manipulated by placing salt (in a small bag) on one face and sugar (in a small bag) on the other face.

Ping. Pingpingpingpingping. Ping.

All green plant material has it’s own variation of salt and sugar in order for it to correctly manipulate sunlight. If a small bag containing sugar is attached to the upper surface of a leaf within your listening territory, including the garden, a noticeable beneficial effect will take place with your sense of hearing. A small bag containing salt can be attached to the underside of the leaf with the same beneficial effect.

Little bags of sugar? Leaves? Hearing? Wha? Wha? Ping. So the trees can hear better? Ping. Listening territory? Little bags of salt attached to leaves? Ping. Pingpingping.

Special One Drop Liquid can replace, with an increased effect, salt and sugar applied to the faces of an object, including to the faces of green plant life. The Special One Drop Liquid admits only forward facing light energy.

Righty-ho! The Special One Drop Liquid is for replacing little bags of salt and sugar that I have tied to the top and bottoms of leaves in my listening territory! Now we’re getting somewhere. P-i-i-n-n-n-g.

All Compact Discs should have a drop of the Special One Drop Liquid applied to both sides and spread across the surface using a finger tip.

Obviously! Wow, that’s totally brilliant! No longer will I have to put up with the mess from all that salt and sugar and dead leaf material that bursts out of the little bags tied to my CDs that clog up my CD player every time I try and play something. It’s a MIRACLE!

The surface can be dried with a cloth or a paper tissue. Vinyl records should have a drop of the Liquid applied to the particular area on the record which has the run off groove on both sides of the disc. The outside faces of the disc sleeve or disc housing should also be treated.

Well duh. Anyone with half a brain can see that if you’re going to treat the run off groove on a vinyl record, you need to treat the sleeve as well. Think of the savings on sugar and salt for a start!

To ascertain the effect of the One Drop Liquid on any object, it is only necessary to initially stand the small bottle containing the Liquid on the face of the object.

P-I-N-G!

ALL transparent material within a listening room, including glass windows, clock faces, wrist watch faces, TV screens, the lenses of eye glasses etc. and display windows on equipment should all be treated. It is only necessary to apply one drop of the Liquid to the corner of a glass window for the beneficial effect to be heard.

Anyone still with me? Guys? Gals?

The One Drop Liquid is particularly effective if applied to the rear of a photograph and to the glass face of a photographic frame. Artificial light, in the form of electrical light bulbs, has a particularly detrimental effect upon the sense of hearing and the glass of an electric light bulb should be treated.

Oh heck. Just smear the damn stuff on everything! In no time your hearing acuity will approach that of bats. I don’t know why the guys at PWB are selling this in those teeny little bottles. At the rate of application that they’re suggesting you’d go through a gallon just in your lounge room.

And if you’re skeptical at forking out for Special One Drop Liquid, have no fear! On the PWB Electronics site I found a whole swag of other tips for improving the sound quality of your music too (it isn’t clear whether these necessarily apply only to CDs either – as far as I can tell, any/all of these methods are effective in improving music just generally. Amazing!). For superior musical reproduction, merely:

•Place a piece of paper under one of the feet of any piece of furniture in the room!

•Pin back any one corner of a curtain in the room!

•Place a blue piece of paper under a vase of flowers in the room!

•Tie a reef knot in the power cables of your equipment!

•Freeze your CD in the freezer!

•Align all the screw heads in the room to be parallel to the Earth’s surface!

You think I’m making all this up, don’t you?

Ping.

___________________________________________________________________________

Thanks (I think) to Stewart via Kirke for bringing this to the attention of The Cow.

___________________________________________________________________________

Some Questions, Some Answers and Some Observations

Sally sent me this today, and I am forced to make the assumption that Sally is in cahoots with Fountain-In-The-City on account of the strikingly similar accomplishments in the field of graphic arts displayed in The Secret Key and The Prophetic Code (of which you will recall I have spoken previously).

Let us begin.

The Questions: (if you feel so inclined, read them out loud in a deep reverberant voice for full effect):

What is The Secret Key?

I don’t know, but judging by the picture it gets you into a room with retina-scorching bright light. I am not entirely sure why this would be desirable.

Did you see the Oprah Show about the Law of Attraction?

No. Unless it was the one where Tom Cruise went bananas jumping up and down on the couch. I’ve seen that one. Is that typical of the level of credibility of Oprah shows?

Have you seen the movies The Secret or What the Bleep?

No. But I am familiar with the kind of dopey pseudo-science claptrap they peddle. Does that help?

Some Observations:

OK, this is what I deduce from a semiotic reading of this image: The man in the picture is definitely in need of The Secret Key. At least, he really needs to get into the room with the all the Persil-level luminance since he’s evidently having a lot of trouble making out his Ancient Wisdom by the light of a solitary candle. The hourglass is telling me that he’s running out of time, and the globe of the world under his arm obviously indicates a trip to foreign climes, perhaps to join forces with Tom Cruise on one of L. Ron Hubbard’s old ships to look for hidden treasure. The thing in the top left of frame looks suspiciously like a mandrake root and from this I conclude he intends (once he has some decent lighting) to make an homonculus. He possibly intends the homonculus to be interviewed by Oprah.

Aha! The whole thing falls into place! It’s so frighteningly clear that I knew exactly what I would see when I clicked on the link!

Did you?

Cowlexâ„¢ in association with Tetherd Cow Ahead is excited to bring you a new fragrance from the creators of Brimstoneâ„¢ and Lamb of Godâ„¢: Sister Veronica’s Vibrance – an Experience BEYOND Perfume…

OK. Now I’ve found something that tops even the Steorn bozos’ concepts for sheer technical daftness. Or downright thievery – you decide.

Over at Creative we find this offering for those who don’t have two brain cells to rub together (but plenty of excess cash, I guess) – the ‘Xmod X-Fi Module’ for your PC that actually ‘improves’ your lousy computer sound to an ‘experience beyond studio quality’.

Let me just rephrase that for the slow learners: you stick this gadget in between your mp3s and your speakers and the sound comes out better than the studio recording of the original track!

Shit, I’m going to buy twenty of these and give them to all my Pro Sound buddies. If it can make mp3 sound better than studio recording, then it follows that it can make studio recordings sound better than angels singing the glories of God and His Creation!*

Consider this assertion on the website:

•Restore the details and vibrance that your music lost during MP3 compression

Disregarding first of all that ‘vibrance’ is not actually a real word, let’s examine this claim. First of all, a simplified technical lesson: mp3, or MPEG Audio Layer 3, is a format which is known in the business as a ‘lossy’ form of compression. What this means is that some clever technical hocus-pocus is used to take an audio file and compress it in such a way that some of the less important original data can be thrown away to make the file smaller but (hopefully) without a listener being able to notice too much of a reduction in fidelity.

The key term here is thrown away. To get an audio file (say a CD quality file) down to a much smaller sized mp3, savage and ugly chopping has to be done and the unwanted data is irretrievably blitzed. Chucked. Trashed. Flushed. Things from the original audio file no longer exist in the mp3 file.

Our friends from Creative are claiming that they can somehow reconstitute this no-longer-extant data – raise it from the dead, so to speak – and set it walking among the living once more. Not only that, they are saying that the mp3 will not only sound as good as the CD you ripped it from, but better than that.

There’s a highly technical term for this kind of thing, and that term is CRAP!

In order that they might convince you of their highly dubious hyperbole, Creative offer you the chance to actually hear X-Fi in action. Going on the provided example I might make the suggestion that they should abandon the waffly try-hard ‘X-Fi’ moniker and go for the much more accurate ExcrementSoundâ„¢ label. Using a breathtakingly cliched Flash presentation, the Creative people show us how their X-Fi system can take a perfectly ordinary and dull piece of music and sound like a perfectly ordinary, dull, and sibilant piece of music. Huzzah! They’ve discovered the treble control. Now instead of that fuzzy futzing aliasing of the high frequencies in an mp3 you can have nicely fizzy, ear-scouring futzing aliasing. Wow. Better than studio sound! I know – I try every day to get my sound to be this unpleasant, but fail comprehensively.

Oh, I just can’t go on. The only thing that’s creative about Creative is their ability to effectively recycle that old saw: Never give a sucker an even break.

___________________________________________________________________________

*This is a colourful image for comic effect. I do not believe in Creation, angels or God.

___________________________________________________________________________

The Battle of the Magic Waters

SCENE 1: Int. fancy modern office. Day.

DAVID COPPERFIELD, famed stage magician, is talking to his agent on the phone.

DAVID (angry):

Whaddya mean Madonna’s got magic water? She’s a pop star for crying out loud! What does she know about magic?

(Offscreen sound of agent through phone filter)

DAVID (steam coming out ears):

Oh yeah, is that so? Well I’ll show her!

SCENE 2: Ext. The Copperfield helipad, Bahamas. Day.

DAVID climbs from his chopper and strides purposefully to his waiting limo.

DAVID (under his breath):

Does she have any idea who she’s dealing with?

SCENE 3: Copperfield Private Island in the Exuma Chain. Day.

DAVID is dropping DEAD LEAVES into a fountain. His beautiful assistant LOURDES sits nearby.

DAVID:

Do you see that? Do you see? The dead leaves are ALIVE again! ALIVE, do you hear me! The water from the fountain is RESTORING THEM TO LIFE. I have discovered THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH here on this private island that I bought for $50 million dollars. What an astounding coincidence that I, DAVID COPPERFIELD, World Famous Illusionist, should be the one to find the SECRET OF ETERNAL LIFE! It’s truly amazing that no peasant farmer has stumbled across this MIRACULOUS FOUNTAIN!

LOURDES (smiling adoringly at DAVID):

David, do that thing with the handkerchiefs again. I love it when you do that.

___________________________________________________________________________

Sigh. Yes it’s true. David Copperfield thinks he’s discovered the Fountain of Youth on his private Island in the Bahamas. I swear, I could sit here for a week and never come up with stuff as bizarre as this. What happens with these people? They make untold wealth and then their brains just fall out? Or maybe I’m being generous in attributing brains to them in the first place.

My thanks to Fighting For Science where I discovered this new worrying example of a world gone mad. Go visit them and tell them The Cow sent you.

I remember reading an interview with Madonna some years back in which she claimed that she had given up all the wacky belief systems she’d been into and now had taken up Kabbalah. ‘Cos, like, that’s not a wacky belief system, right?

So of course she wouldn’t endorse some loopy scheme involving pouring ‘blessed’ water into lakes polluted with nuclear waste to ‘cleanse’ them, right?

And she wouldn’t be lobbying the British Government to approve the scheme, right?

Yes, loyal Acowlytes, I can see that you’ve grasped the rhetorical nature of those questions. Madonna is indeed trying to persuade government officials that enchanted magic water will eliminate the problem of radioactive contamination.

Here’s a quote from Madonna in which she casually attempts to hint that, in spite of what we all thinks she spends her days doing, she’s actually been hangin’ out with the geek crowd:

“I mean, one of the biggest problems that exists right now in the world is nuclear waste,” she said. “That’s something I’ve been involved with for a while with a group of scientists – finding a way to neutralise radiation, believe it or not.”

Yep, Madonna has been beavering away behind the scenes in the lab with her egg-head homies solving all the world’s problems while you have been doing what? Just pirating her mp3s and dropping E, I’ll wager.

It occurs to me that there is a scientific equation that can be solved here. Madonna is rich and, with very little acumen about just how it might be done, wants to save the world. On the other side of the plus sign, the Steorn crackpots are looking for gullible air-heads with plenty of spare cash. If only someone would put them together – then they might amuse one another for years and eventually disappear up each other’s magnetic vortex.

You know, I really hate to admit it, but in light of all this I have really developed a new respect for Bill Gates.