Tetherd Cow Ahead

Are you nervous yet, Anne Arkham?

I like all the people I work with. They are a bunch of nice folks with their heads screwed on correctly for the most part. But occasionally someone, it is not clear who, will do something uncommonly daft. Like, as happened this week, pinning up on the noticeboard in the kitchen one of those pointless and inane lists that get sent to all & sundry via email by alleged ‘friends’. Needless to say, I have no friends who would dare email me this sort of thing – I have long since trained them to desist. Or I have killed them.

So, having escaped the electronic version of this kind of waffle, you can imagine my irritation in discovering an A4 sheet outlining ‘Some Interesting Facts…’ appearing on the communal corkboard.

The thing is, I really don’t want to read these interesting facts because I know from the outset that they will more likely be nonsensical crap, but, as I stand there waiting for the kettle to boil, my eye is inexorably drawn to the bullet points and I find myself reading…

♦ A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

Oh yeah. I guess. But really, WHO CARES?

♦ There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

Ho hum. I doubt it, but whatever.

♦ There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple or silver.

Yawn.

♦ A 2 X 4 is really 1½ by 3½.

Excuse me while I eviscerate myself.

♦ A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. No-one knows why.

What? I mean, WHAT? A duck’s quack doesn’t echo? I am a qualified sound technician with 25 years worth of practical experience and theoretical study that allows me to put appropriate letters after my name, but even if I was a bus conductor with a certificate in needlework I think I could spot this for the idiotic piece of utter claptrap that it is. Now hear me: a duck’s quack or anything else that is audible to the human ear will have an echo. It’s a fundamental property of acoustics. It is possible, that if a duck quacks softly, then it won’t make a loud enough sound to echo off anything, but (are you listening?) THIS HAS NOT GOT THE SLIGHTEST THING TO DO WITH DUCKS! Try getting an echo off a human whisper – same problem: not enough acoustic energy for the sound to travel somewhere, get reflected and return to your ear. There is no mystery about this. The Duck Quack Furphy is just a dumb ‘factoid’ that some nitwit smoking dried coleus leaves has, in an hallucinogenic haze deemed plausible, and, that through the weight of a million billion emails has gained the kind of weird ersatz credibility that only the internet can bestow.

(Of course, jet-setting pedants among readers of The Cow will be quick to point out that if you stand in Whispering Gallery in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London you can get a bit of an echo off a whisper, but I say to you: for a real treat, next time you visit St Paul’s take a duck with you.)

So, as far as I can determine this list of amazing facts can be divided into two main categories: things that are boring and things that are just plain baloney. This does not surprise me; most of the internet can be classified in that way.

Anyhoo, since I’ve been made to suffer these pearls of wisdom, so must you. Consider:

♦ The real reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to search for water.

No it isn’t.

♦ Celery has negative calories. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.

No it doesn’t.

♦ Between 1937 and 1945 Heinz produced a version of Alphabetti Spaghetti especially for the German market that consisted solely of little pasta swastikas.

No they didn’t.

♦ People say “Bless you” when you sneeze because when you sneeze, your heart stops for a milli-second.

No they don’t because no it doesn’t.

♦ The name Wendy was made up for the book “Peter Pan”. There was never a recorded Wendy before.

No it wasn’t and yes there was.

I am willing to speculate that the kind of people who circulate lists such as this one, are also the kind of people who used to flap Polaroid photographs around in the air to dispense some kind of unspecified mystical aid to the developing process. Or who strew their lawn with plastic bottles of water because they think for some unfathomable reason that this will keep dogs (cats/possums/foxes/goats/wildebeests) from defecating thereon.

I mean, really. Just where has all the critical thinking gone? In Pete World this kind of thi… oh shit! Is that the time? I’m overdue for my Past Life Therapy and my colonic irrigation, gotta run.

Bartolomeo Mecánico has taken the trouble to make an archive of road signs that compare interpretations of Men At Work, Children Crossing and Falling Rocks throughout the world. [Link]

Be sure to visit the Boulder Count page which shows a statistical distribution of the numbers of boulders that appear on Falling Rocks signs in different countries.

Bartolomeo, you are hereby inducted into the Tetherd Cow Ahead Society of Treasured Humans as the inaugural member.

Three cheers for Bartolomeo!

This flyer from my letterbox today.

Oh dear. Where does one start? The Ye Olde English font? (Oh, you know, it’s way back whenever, when writing was, like, all flowery an’ that…) The most unappealing image of a pizza you could possibly make (the onion still looks raw for crying out loud)? The fact that one of the most moving images in the history of human creation, the act of God and Adam poised reaching out to one another but not ever touching, is being used to sell pizza? (Maybe the idea is that God and Adam have just freshly tossed the salami and onions from on high?)

Or should we focus upon that little phrase, squeezed in almost as an afterthought: the taste of art?

Could it be that we are meant to infer that Michelangelo’s Café will create for you the Sistine Chapel Ceiling of pizzas? God help us all.

Perhaps I’m being unfair? Righty-ho, I will rise to the challenge and take it upon myself to personally assess the alleged magnificence of Michelangelo’s pizzas, with a dutiful and comprehensive report back here on The Cow in due course. That should keep everyone glued to my blog for a few days.

In the meantime, let us ponder the taste of art. I’m offering these suggestions for business opportunities for aspiring restaurateurs-cum-artists, along with tips for promotional material:

★Picasso’s (Tapas – flyer features ‘Guernica’ and a dish of paella)
★Pollock’s (Diner – flyer with ‘Blue Poles’ & plate of scrambled eggs)
★Degas’ (Creperie – flyer: ballet dancers & Crepes Suzette)
★Duchamp’s (Noodles – flyer: pic of a urinal & plate of sardines)
★Mondrian’s (Waffle House. No brainer…)
★Hirst’s (Steakhouse – cowhide flyer w. pic of jar of formaldehyde)
★Monet’s (Bagels – ‘Poppies’ + poppyseed bagel)
★Calder’s (Mobile Meal Delivery Service)
★Warhol’s Soup Kitchen…

Oh I tire. Over to you, dear readers…

It all started when I went to make a snappy reply to a text that a friend sent me. I meant to tap in ‘Damn slippy!’ but the predictive texting on my Sony Ericsson didn’t want to know about the word ‘damn’. It offered me:

Hmm. The dictionary is highly patchy but ‘damn’ seems like it should be covered. So obviously the word ‘bugger’ wouldn’t make it…. but what’s this?

‘Bugger’ is OK but ‘damn’ is not. Interesting. Well this of course prompted me to launch exploratory mission of finding out what my phone would and would not accept as proper. All the really rude words don’t appear, but the most perplexing thing I discovered is that the word ‘vagina’ is acceptable:

… but that ‘penis’ is not:

I wonder if I could get big money from Sony Ericsson for sexual discrimination?

I leave you with this thought: a person made the decision about what kinds of words the phone’s inbuilt dictionary would include…

I like to think that Mitsubishi was tipping their hat to Robert Wise’s magnificent ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ when they named their ‘Verada’. Here’s my pitch for a new ad to get Verada back into the hearts and minds of motorists across the globe:

Patricia Neal crouches terrified as the ominous Gort approaches and towers over her. But remembering what Klaatu has told her she carefully enunciates the words “Klaatu verada nikto”. The camera cranes up to reveal that Gort has arrived not in a spaceship, but instead has climbed out of a beautiful new shiny silver Verada!

Brilliant huh? No? Well at least it would make some sense of the STUPID name!

As for their dumb ‘Outlander’ well what the feck does that mean? Think about it. Outlander. I’m sure they think that the first thing to spring to mind is some kind of aspirational blend of ‘outback’ and ‘overlander’ but sorry chaps, my brain goes to the nearest equatable English word which is outlandish. There’s no way I’m going to get into a car that proclaims itself as outlandish. Especially one that is so monumentally conservative. That’s not even irony. It’s just deeply sad.

Moving on to the Corolla ‘Ascent’ well what can one say at this pathetic attempt to reassure a potential buyer that it might be able to do more than get up to speed on the downhill run. If you’ve ever seen the car, it’s certainly not a name that could have metaphorical underpinnings as far as social status is concerned. No one is going to look at you in this car and say, “Gee, there goes Frank – he’s certainly certainly heading toward the dizzying heights of fame and success in that fine vehicle of his…”

And then there is the Ford ‘Ka’. What intellectual giant regurgitated that piece of marketing inanity?

Hey I just got a new Ka!

Great! What did you buy?

I’m saying. A Ka.

Yeah I heard you, but what kind?

That’s the kind. A Ka.

Yes, but what model. You know, a Verada? A Getz? An Impreza?

A Ka! I bought a Ka!

Oh forget it moron. I’ve got to go get my Xcel from the panel beater. Some chick with an attitude dragged a key down the side of it.