spockpoot

Loyal acowlyte JR brings to my attention the slightly scary news that Genki Wear (apparently known for its replicas of science fiction & fantasy jewellery) is releasing this Spring a new set of fragrances: Genki Wear Star Trek Perfume – A Trio of Scents from the Final Frontier.

Although this is spruiked widely on various intertube outlets, there’s no actual news at Genki Wear itself, and since their website doesn’t appear to be selling anything except one solitary Buffy pendant, it’s a bit difficult to tell if this announcement is the real deal or just some clever Borg assimilation plot a trés amusing internet prank.

According to trekmovie.com, Genki’s three fragrances will be called Tiberius, Red Shirt and Pon Farr, names I’m sure will have relevance to all Star Trek fans but seem oddly flat to me (aside from the curious and slightly comical sounding Pon Farr, which is, evidently, named after the Vulcan Mating Ritual*).

As you know, I am wont to muse on things perfumical here on The Cow, so I bring you this news by way of an interest-piquing tidbit, a public service announcement and a health warning.

I also invite you to ponder other film or television landmarks that might be rich for plundering for perfume spinoffs. The Addams Family springs immediately to my mind with Swamp, Cordite and Grandmama being possible candidates for fragrances, and Green Acres would similarly suggest Hayseed Martini, Pitchfork and Arnold Ziffle.

We could be onto a veritable Texas Tea gusher here folks.

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*Which also sounds curious and slightly comical. So I guess there’s some method in the madness.

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A pamphlet

Cissy Strutt, ever on the lookout with her Cow Eye (that didn’t sound quite right), sent in this flyer for our mutual hilarity.

Of course, the sentence to which your eyes were surely drawn is ‘I do tarot without all the naff crap‘. Tarot without all the naff crap, is, in this case, just a hot chocolate (as it would also be with all the naff crap). At $15, an expensive hot chocolate to be sure, but when Elle says ‘I’m good’, maybe she’s an ace on the milk steamer.

Still, I kinda empathise with Elle. When I was younger, I too considered a career as a fortune teller, but gave it away because I couldn’t see any future in it.

As you know from recent tales, Violet Towne and I are having our house painted. Now that our home is slowly being illuminated in refreshing shades of clean brightness, we’re beginning to truly appreciate the awfulness of the colours that we’ve been living with up till now.

Take the former colour of the walls of our bedroom. Really, I find it hard to describe to you the true repulsiveness of the hue to which the the previous owners had chosen to awaken each morning. In fact, to my mind it was something that belonged less in the class of pigment than it did in the category of stain, being as it was a shade reminiscent of the flesh of three week-old dead salmon.

What kind of decision process must someone go through to choose a truly hideous colour for the decoration of their place of habitation? Where do they even find the paint to render their walls in such nauseous squalor; colours that certainly never appear on any paint chart I’ve ever seen?

Pondering these questions leads me to suspect that there is a whole class of paint swatches unavailable to People of Taste. Something kept out of sight under the counter with the pebblecrete brochures and garden gnome catalogues. A dog-eared little booklet that remains safely tucked away until a customer with the just the right damp-palmed, sweat-stained, combed-over demeanour enters the shop.

Something with pages that look like this:

Cowlux Colours

Morgovudka

Only From Tetherd Cow Ahead liquor outlets. Refuse all imitations.

One of the interesting aspects of writing a blog is the weft and weave of the ‘conversation’ that it becomes. I write something, people comment, we have a conversation, sometimes we continue that conversation elsewhere. We have in-jokes, and shared memories. We have running gags and traditions and circles of friends who pop up with insights and laughs and just plain ol’ howdy-doodies. It’s kind of like a never-ending cocktail party.

And every now and and then, a very strange person wanders in and sticks their finger in the cheese & onion dip.

You probably won’t have much awareness of what goes on behind the scenes at The Cow at any given time, except maybe for most recent few posts & comments. But sometimes, long after a post has been written, commented on, pinged & trackbacked & faded into blogscurity, a new comment appears. Usually it is just a person who has stumbled on The Cow via a link, or a search for something tangential to the post’s topic – normal people who leave normal (and often, very nice) observations. Sometimes it’s some nutcase with an obsession (check the Peter Popoff posts if you care – they attract loonies like corpses attract flies). And sometimes there are things that are just plain weird.

This morning, Atlas Cerise and I had cause to revisit this post – it’s my dissertation on why clever special effects don’t necessarily add anything to movies. It was the second part of a two-part post and the Cownoscenti had quite a good discussion about the whys and wherefores of moviedom. And if you read down the comments you will see the conversation ends rather naturally after a few days. Then, more than a year later someone who identifies himself* as mnorgovudkka says:

Hy my name is mnorgovudkka
Im from mongolia
Buy

Like a goth wandering through the front gate after the last guests have left, mnorgovudkka stands blinking in the bright porch light for a few seconds before shuffling back off into the shadows.

Mostly, I delete these kinds of daft ‘comments’ (and mostly they are linked to a site that I guess is some kind of spamming deal), but I left mnorgovudkka‘s comment because I thought it was kind of entertaining. It wasn’t linked to anything and it didn’t seem to be meaningful in any way – something wacky and pointless for people to find if they were reading back through the archives (kinda like Malach’s comments). It would have been far more amusing if mnorgovudkka had come from Romania, but hey.

Sure enough, during our conversation this morning, Atlas pointed the comment out to me, and I was kinda glad that he’d stumbled across mnorgovudkka‘s nutty noodling. But then, on a whim I plugged ‘mnorgovudkka’ into a Google search, and bugger me! 7690 hits! And guess what? Pretty much all of them seem to be mnorgovudkka‘s same daft comment. In internet terms, mnorgovudkka is a veritable internet celebrity!

For some reason, though, Google thought I’d made a mistake and helpfully suggested that maybe I didn’t mean to search for ‘mnorgovudkka’, but rather ‘morgovudka’, which makes equally as little sense. OK, I’m game, let’s see… clicking on ‘morgovudka’ returns exactly NO hits! Thank you Google, but where did you GET that name from, if there are no hits for it? WHERE? Did you make it up? Are you in cahoots with mnorgovudkka?

And, now that I’m blogging about this, I expect I’ve completely ruined the whole point of that last question because ‘morgovudka’ will return hits to this page! So the Google search will have become meaningful just because this whole series of bizarre events happened!!!

It’s like some freaky self-referential time warp and I’m trapped in it! SOMEBODY HELP ME!

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*Of course, mnorgovudkka could just as easily be female, but somehow…

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A Very Valuable Fridge

The item above is currently up on eBay for $500. Get in quick!

From the Wikipedia entry on Iridium:

Iridium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust, with annual production and consumption of only three tonnes. However, it does find a number of specialized industrial and scientific applications.* Iridium is employed when high corrosion resistance and high temperatures are needed, as in spark plugs, crucibles for recrystallization of semiconductors at high temperatures, electrodes for the production of chlorine in the chloralkali process, and radioisotope thermoelectric generators used in unmanned spacecraft. Iridium compounds also find applications as catalysts for the production of acetic acid.

~

Annual production of iridium circa 2000 was around 3 tonnes or about 100,000 troy ounces (ozt). The price of iridium as of 2007 was $440 USD/ozt.

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*Note that these applications do not include ‘… the cosmetic decoration of domestic appliances’

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