Tetherd Cow Ahead

I’m packing up my house into cardboard boxes in preparation for my impending relocation from Sydney to Melbourne. As is always the case when it comes to reviewing the amount of crap one accumulates over the years, there have been many sidetracks, some of which will almost certainly make it to The Cow over the next short while.

This book, which I found in my study, was sent to me nearly two years ago by a fellow blogger with whom I was once in almost daily contact. It is called ‘Strange Red Cow (and other curious classified ads from the past)’ by Sarah Bader. It’s a curious, quirky, charming book and as soon as I picked it up I was reminded strongly of the curious, quirky, charming personality of the woman who sent it to me.

I never actually met her in real life, sadly, and she stopped blogging over a year ago with no warning or explanation, and after the very worst kind of family crisis. She also stopped replying to my emails. I have many friends, both in the real world and in cyberspace, and I know from experience that usually when someone abruptly stops communicating it means trouble. I really hope that’s not the case, and I hope she just got bored with blogging and the ephemera of online friends and has found a really happy and contented space in her real world. I guess I’ll never know.*

Que sera, sera.

When I took a break from my cramming of things into boxes and and had a quick nostalgic browse through Strange Red Cow I found this ad, which I like to think would have appealed to her:

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*We can say for certain that she’s not attending to her blog. Great drifts of spam now clog up all the comments on her posts, reminding me as nothing so much as an abandoned house with its porch ankle-deep in unswept leaves.

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… and since we’re astrologizing, did you all catch the total lunar eclipse and corresponding ‘Blood Moon’ last night? The park near my house was filled with folks looking skyward, which for me was almost as big a thrill as the event itself.

It still amazes me, though, how confused and ill-informed people continue to be about events like this. As I walked up the street to the park, glancing up at the beginning of the eclipse, an old bloke said to me knowingly “Better get a good look – you’ll never see that again in your lifetime…”*

Lunar eclipses occur frequently, sometimes two or three times in a year, total eclipses a little less frequently. ‘Blood’ or ‘Hunter’s’ moons appear whenever there is a total lunar eclipse.† I’ve already seen a few, and I hope to see a few more, all things going well.

Acts 2:20 ~ The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.

Of course the religious loonies leap upon this sort of thing with gusto. As an omen, the red moon is surely the lamest of portents to choose – by my calculation, the Earth has seen at least two thousand of these since the apostle Peter penned the above prediction. Even if you assume that St Peter was referring to a combination of solar & lunar eclipses, it’s not such a rare thing for those things to occur in tandem.

If you want to know when your next Blood Moon occurs, you can do no better than fire up the Javascript Lunar Eclipse Explorer at NASA. Plug in your capital city and your century and you’re set to plan your next End Times Picnic!

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*Of course, it is possible that he was clairvoyant, and the real meaning of his pronouncement was that I’ll be turning up my toes before the next lunar eclipse occurs…

†Unless there are extenuating circumstances – a lunar eclipse on December 30, 1982 was almost completely dark. Dust from the recently erupting Mexican volcano El Chichon clouded the atmosphere to such an extent that it occluded the sun’s rays, preventing them from casting their filtered red light on the moon.

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The Tetherd Cow Ahead Horoscope of Infinite Detail™
with Iotas Scrivener
Week Commencing August 27, 2007

Aries ~ The Ram

Well Aries – the Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars in no uncertain terms this coming week. You know your office mate that stole the pencil sharpener last Thursday? The one with the cheeky smile? Well consider yourself in like Flynn! Yep, before the week is out you two are going to be under the covers and going at it like rabbits. To cap off the week, when you eventually turn on your phone after three days of hot sex, you will discover that you have inherited nearly a hundred million dollars from a fond uncle. You will also receive an erroneously calculated gas bill and find termites in the east corner of your house. Your lucky number is 17 – why not buy a lottery ticket – you’ve siphoned all the luck out of some other poor bastard’s universe, may as well go for broke!

Taurus ~ The Bull

Few weeks of your life will be quite as boring as this one. When you accidentally kick over a cartoon of orange juice on Flinders St on Tuesday, it will seem like an earth-shattering event to you. None of your friends will think so, however, especially Aries. Other than that, you will watch a re-run of House on tv, pick your nose twice and notice that all the cars in your street have number plates ending in 3 or 7. On Thursday you will get out of bed on the opposite side to the one you normally do.

Gemini ~ The Twins

With your sign under the influence of Uranus, this will be a real arse of a week for Geminis. An electrical fault in your car ignition system tomorrow will cause you to break down in the middle of commuter traffic. When you get out of your car to lift the bonnet so you can pretend that you actually have a clue what goes on under there, a passing motorist will call you a ‘pugnacious lemon-brained froth-sucker’. At least that’s what it will sound like as they speed past. After you have trudged to work in a relentless drizzle you will remember that it was your day off anyway. The rest of the week is a little better, with a nice warm day on Tuesday and a particularly tasty chicken salad sandwich for lunch on Wednesday. Your lucky colour is off-white and your lucky fruit is cumquat.

Cancer ~ The Crab

There’s no business like show business Cancer, and that’s no business for you to contemplate for even a second. Monday evening brings the temptation to go centre stage at an after-work karaoke escapade, a temptation to which you will quickly wish you hadn’t succumbed. The video clip taken by a workmate will be posted on YouTube and will receive 172,980 viewings. Most of those viewers will be laughing at you, not with you. You will not go into work on Tuesday, which will turn out to be a wise decision. On Wednesday you will receive news of a distant relative’s win on the lottery. You will eat a mediocre pasta dish on Thursday evening and drink a little too much red wine. On the weekend you will see a bizarre accident involving a person dressed in a bear costume and a clothes rack. Your sleep will be disturbed by dreams of escaped bees.

Leo ~ The Lion

On Monday you will be crushed to death by an unsecured piano falling out the back of a furniture truck.

Virgo ~ The Virgin

With Neptune high in the sky and Mercury on the ascendant, the next few days bring many exciting small things for Virgos. Early on there will be a letter in your name with a ten dollar voucher at K-Mart. On Tuesday a man in Liederhosen will goose you on the bus. Wednesday morning sees the commencement of a subscription to National Geographic and the afternoon brings an offer of scones and jam. Thursday you will be given a small parcel by a Middle Eastern man. It will contain Turkish Delight, a packet of cardamom pods and some spools of maroon thread. Over the weekend there will be some nice weather. You will see something funny on the tv that will cause you to snort Coca Cola over a clean shirt.

Libra ~ The Scales

After last week, you’ll be wanting to sit down and take it easy you Librans! Which is what you’ll attempt to do, and fail. You face a week of constant interruptions, aggravations and stomach ailments. You will try to avoid being contacted by switching off your mobile phone, but that won’t work – news of a relative’s recent windfall (an inheritance due to the death of a wealthy uncle) will reach you by singing telegram. A car will break down in front of you in peak-hour traffic and you will uncharacteristically shout obscenities at the poor sod looking under the uplifted hood. You will witness an horrific accident in which a person is crushed to death by a piano.

Scorpio ~ The Scorpion

Scorpio! What a week you have ahead! You know how you’ve always wanted to parachute out of plane at 3000 feet? No? Well that’s what you find yourself doing anyway. It’s not at all fun. Later in the week you will hit your head very hard on the sharp under-edge of a cabinet. There will be a lot of blood. But fear not! Romance is in the air! A tall dark mysterious stranger wearing a cape will give you flowers (an attractive selection of gerberas, daisies and lilies) at the bus stop. Unfortunately they will trigger your hayfever and you will spend the rest of the week in bed. An email sent to you by Bill Gates, offering you a million dollars, turns out to be spam. Your lucky number this week is 1.232 and your lucky woodworking tool is an awl.

Ophiucus ~ The Serpent Bearer

As usual, people will fail to take any notice of you this week, and you will feel transparent and insignificant.

Sagittarius ~ The Archer

A trip to deep thermal vents in a submersible is on the cards for lucky Sagittarius this week. You probably don’t think that’s likely, but it is a damn site more likely than the discovery of the alien civilization at the bottom of the ocean which follows. You find yourself front-page news along with the other 500 million Sagittarians who were down there. Your lucky colour is taupe and your lucky grain is barley.

Capricorn ~ The Sea-goat

Remarkably, this week for Capricorns is exacty the same in every detail as last week.

Aquarius ~ The Water Carrier

Aquarius can look forward to a letter in the post this week. It will contain some news from Peter Popoff, with a lot of writing and a piece of The True Cross. Later in the week brings a visit from a Greenpeace representative wanting you to join up. She will give you a leaflet and a sticker. You will have a very spicy curry on Wednesday night, and some garlic naan bread. A noisy neighbour will keep you awake on Thursday by playing seemingly endless repetitions of ‘My Sharona’ on their hi-fi. Your lucky vegetable is a swede, as is your lucky National representative.

Pisces ~ The Fishes

As the week commences Pisceans might start to think that they’re going insane. As, in fact, they are. By Wednesday the hallucinations will have well and truly set in, and you’ll all be completely bonkers by 3pm Thursday. Your lucky colour is paisley and your lucky medication is Valium.

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As mentioned last week, Iotas Scrivener, The Cow’s resident astrologer, claims that the accuracy of these predictions is better than 99.72%. Iotas uses state-of-the-art quantum processors to compute simultaneous outcomes in an infinite number of parallel universes. Whilst the precision of the results is guaranteed, the TCA Horoscope of Infinite Detail™ cannot be held responsible if the outcome of the prediction is not applicable to the universe in which you reside.

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So anyway. The Vatican has evidently decided that, in keeping with their habit of meddling in matters in which they have no expertise (nor even barely adequate knowledge for that matter), they need to hand down some rules, Commandments, even, for the drivers of motor vehicles. Yes, you heard right, The Holy Office has decided that what the world really really needs is a Catholic Church endorsed Ten Commandments of Motoring.

What? I say, what?

How do they get an imprimatur to do this kind of thing? Where the hell is anything about motoring mentioned in the Bible? (OK, OK, not counting that bit about Moses charging across the desert in his Triumph)

To demonstrate the clarity of mind with which The Holy See tackles this matter, I ask you to scrutinize the above image taken from their 36-page document Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road. In case you can’t quite make it out, this a picture of a chap wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Being Drunk is Fun’ whilst directing traffic. The traffic consists of rabbits in open-top cars. The man holding the sign has some kind of radiation emerging from behind him. Note the black arrow that points upwards near his Stop sign.

OK. Without reading further, anyone have even a remote idea what this is supposed to convey?

Let me enlighten you: this is Commandment of the Road #9 – On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.

Do I need to offer a more persuasive example of why religion in general, and The Pope in particular, should not be allowed even close to matters of the Actual Real World. To further emphasize the tenuous grip on reality that the Catholic Church is demonstrating with their release of the Asphalt Tablets, I note that they also suggest that ‘praying while driving’ is to be encouraged. I’d like to suggest that concentrating while driving would be far more useful, having experienced my fair share of drivers who have evidently substituted prayer for road knowledge.

Well, if the Vatican can get in on the act, I see no reason at all why I shouldn’t have a say. I submit for your delectation:

The Church of the Holy Cow Ten Commandments of Motoring.

#1: Thou shalt not drive big gas-guzzling SUVs nor Hummers nor those stupid trucks with unnaturally big wheels.

#2: Thou shalt not sit in thy motionless car for hours with thine engine running for absolutely no reason.

#3: Thou shalt not install in thy vehicle a music system that has more power than thine engine.

#4: Thou shalt not display ‘wobbly head’ dogs on thy dashboard.

#5: Thou shalt not display ‘clever’ number plates like CUL8R or S810*

#6: Thou shalt not have a horn that plays ‘krazy’ tunes like Yankee Doodle Dandy.

#7: Thou shalt not drive around gratuitously burning fossil fuel in a convoy of stupid little vehicles towing advertising signs.

#8: Thou shalt not be a seller nor a buyer of a vehicle with a stupid brand name.

#9: Thou shalt not make “motoring-related” music video clips such as this.

#10: That last one contains enough sin for two Commandments.

Here endeth today’s Lesson.

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*I feel very pleased with myself that I just made that up!

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Since the last post seemed to cause so much puzzlement, and numerous alternative suggestions for the mad scientist’s comment, I’ve decided that you guys need a chance.

OK Acowlytes – have at it!

Does anyone else find it kinda unsettling to see signs with animals advertising the delights of consumption of their own flesh?

Consider this example. Why is the word ‘meet’ in quotation marks? What does the cow mean by this?