Tetherd Cow Ahead

Regular Cow visitors will remember some of the weird messages I’ve managed to attract to my answering machine. Today I arrived home to find another one. I can only think that the universe is trying to tell me something. I really wish I understood Universalese.

Chicken machine?

(I totally swear that these are real messages).

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Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, the reason that the nice English lady always says ‘Monday, 12am’ is that every time the power fails the answering machine clock defaults. I used to reset it but I just gave up…

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So anyway, I’m at Sydney Airport at Gate 32 when the following is heard across the PA system:

This is a final boarding call for passengers Arthur Gibson, Muriel Campanella, Ron Silvers and Bruce Majollica* on flight number D567 to Melbourne. This flight has boarded and is waiting on you in order to depart. Passengers Arthur Gibson, Muriel Campanella, Ron Silvers and Bruce Majollica, please make your way to Gate 34, your aircraft is ready to depart.

This announcement is made at least a half dozen times over the course of twenty minutes or so, with the staff becoming more and more agitated, but still maintaining the proper good-mannered airport aplomb. There are, in fact, four ‘Final’ boarding calls.

“You know what?” I say to Violet Towne. “If this was Cow Air, by now I’d be broadcasting it like this”:

Passengers Arthur Gibson, Muriel Campanella, Ron Silvers and Bruce Majollica, will you please get your slack asses out of the bar and over to Gate 34 quick smart. There’s a plane full of really pissed-off people here who want to know why you’re making the hour-long flight to Melbourne take twice as long. You’d better have good excuses.

Other innovations I would introduce on Cow Air:

•Disposal of useless safety demonstration on plane, replacing it with one word: PANIC! Because I know that’s what everyone would do if the plane started crashing. Why not make it easy for passengers to comply with instructions?

•Compulsory confinement to seats, upon landing of the aircraft, until after the exit doors have actually been opened. Can someone explain to me why as soon as the seatbelt sign is switched off everyone seems to feel the need to leap from their seat, desperately hoik their luggage out of the overhead compartment and then queue sardine-like in the plane aisle for ten minutes? Listen up people – the doors ain’t opening any faster just because you’re on your feet. The airline wants you off the plane just as much as you want to be off. Everybody is working for the same result here. You may as well enjoy the wait sitting down.†

•Free alcohol. No-one should have to endure Economy Class air travel sober.

•Summary execution for seat-kickers. Especially children.

•Coffee that tastes like coffee instead of watery aviation fuel.

•Cowhide covered seats. Wouldn’t that look cool!?

•Flame-grilled ribs. C’mon – even you vegetarians have gotta admit that the smell of fine BBQ wafting down the aisle at meal times would be w-a-a-a-y better than the sick-making odour of re-heated fish in foil.‡

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*Not their real names.

†I dunno – maybe it’s so they can get off the plane a few seconds earlier and relish the extra time at the baggage carousel?

‡Yes, alright, I can hear the more astute among you protesting that you’d never be able to eat ribs with plastic knives and forks. On Cow Air we don’t hold with such namby-pamby business as kiddy cutlery. Not only would passengers be allowed nail scissors and hacksaw blades, each would be issued with a steak knife. We believe that the real reason behind terrorism is bad airline food.

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… what about a thousand pictures?

There’s a quirky, if ultimately completely useless* tool here that allows you to upload any image and have it reconstituted as a mosaic of other pictures (all sucked out of the flickr database).

Click the image of The Reverend for the full size mosaic.

Have fun!

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*I have to admit though that the geeky side of me has great admiration for people who can figure out how to make something as clever as this…

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My leafy, tree-lined street is a lovely quiet alcove in the busy inner-city suburb where I live. I remember that, once-upon-a-time, on sleepy mornings, after autumn had shaken a myriad golden leaves from the figs that shade the road, I would sometimes wake to happy tuneful whistling and the swish swish swish of a broom, as my local council cleanup crew swept the leaves up into tidy piles to be scooped into hessian bags for removal. Ah, how peaceful, how efficient, how pleasant on the ears.

That was of course before the introduction of the most heinous contraption ever inflicted on civilization: The Leaf Blower.*

Now Mr Cheerful Whistling Sweeper has been replaced by Mr Evil Scowling Fat Bastard† Noisemaker who tippy-toes down the street, carefully and silently navigating around any crackly dry leaves or brittle twigs that might give advance warning of his approach, to arrive outside my window at 6.59am. There he stands, savouring the oily fumes of his machine, counting to himself the seconds left to the end of the pillowy morning peace. Right on the stroke of 7 he fires his infernal machine into life…

Rrrrzrzrrzrzrrzrrrrzrrgggeeeeererrrzzrzrrzr

Is it possible to imagine a more despicable piece of useless crap than the leaf blower? It is noisy, it uses fossil fuel, makes pollution and it is available to the general public without even the minimal academic requirement of a coupon from a Cornflakes box. And it serves no useful purpose other than to be a substitute for something that is at least as effective, is cheaper, clean, makes an agreeable sound and has stood the test of thousands of years.

I believe that the essence of all evil in the world can be seen distilled in this one abominable invention. That’s what happens when you go against the natural laws of physics and create a device that simultaneously blows and sucks.

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*Although it’s a close contest with the loathsome Jet Ski.

†In my experience, the leaf blower is invariably wielded by someone who looks like they’d get a lot more benefit out of using a broom.

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A recently reported ‘fault’ in Apple MacBooks is described thus:

“The machine makes faint bovine-like ‘mooing’ noise after moderate to heavy use”

Apple diagnoses this as a firmware problem, but here at The Cow, the only comment we feel at liberty to make is ‘Mwahahahahahahahaha!’

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.

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

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