Tetherd Cow Ahead

Found by Phoebe Fay. Well, OK, maybe it’s a l-e-e-e-e-tle bit different to the one she discovered.

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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Jasmuheen grabs a midnight snack.

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series

Hello and welcome. Today we begin a new series here on The Cow – an examination of some of the, er, more unusual beliefs held by human beings. I’m not talking about your common garden-variety misapprehensions like homeopathy or free energy, but the real The-World-Is-Flat/Aliens-Are-Among-Us delusions of certified fruitcakes. And to show some impartiality I’m not even going to go straight for the easy pickings of American loonies, but instead start with an Australian.

This is Jasmuheen. She is a Breatharian.

Jasmuheen believes (or she says she believes – these are two very different things…) that she doesn’t need to eat any food or drink any water to survive. At all. Ever. In scientific terms, this qualifies her as an idiot.

Breatharians like Jasmuheen say that instead of consuming the nutrients that our species has needed for several hundreds of thousands of years, they are instead able to live on a mystical energy called prana, a Sanskrit term that refers to a kind of ‘life-force’. Indeed, many Breatharians assert that they can bypass prana entirely and live exclusively on sunlight. Well, why not, eh? Plants can do it. Jasmuheen herself has written a book called Living on Light: A Source of Nutrition for the New Millennium in which she outlines a 21 day program that will stop your body from aging and allow you to achieve immortality by living solely on light.

I can hear what you’re saying: if Breatharians live only on sunlight, how do you tell one from a philodendron? Well, effectively, you can’t. Certainly they are the intellectual equivalents of philodendrons. They also typically exhibit a greenish skin colour after several weeks without food or water.

Jasmuheen, or Ellen Greve as her name appears on her income tax file, runs an organisation known as the CIA. Hahahaha! No, young fella, sit down there, it’s not the Central Intelligence Agency of the good ol’ US of A (even though that would explain a lot) but the Cosmic Internet Academy!!! (WARNING: SANITY-SAPPING RAINBOW ALERT if you click on that link). Taking a quick spin ’round the CIA website we can find, among other things, information on Interdimensional Field Science, handy facts about Divine Nutrition Research, and Breatharian suggestions for ‘eradicating world health & hunger challenges’ [sic]. Well of course! Just let poor people eat air!!! Problem solved! Doh! How the hell could we have missed that!

Here you can also see (and purchase, should you, for some reason, take complete leave of your senses) Jasmuheen’s ‘art’. You can even experience her incomprehensible babbling pearls of wisdom directly via one her her many YouTube appearances, such as this one:

If you’ve bothered to endure that video, here are some things you might like to ponder:

• In the interview, there is a jug of water on the table in front of Jasmuheen – who is it for?

• There is a some kind of palm tree behind Jasmuheen – is it my imagination, or does she seem agitated that it is hogging all the light?

• After listening to what Jasmuheen has to say, who do you think would make the more formidable Scrabble opponent – her or the palm tree?

In 1999, the Australian version of 60 Minutes put Jasmuheen’s claims to the test under controlled conditions. After Jasmuheen had fasted for four days the experiment was terminated on the advice of Dr. Berris Wink, president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, who was monitoring her vital signs. In the doctor’s professional opinion, Ellen Greve was in danger of dehydration and kidney failure if she went any longer without water.

Jasmuheen, on the other hand, says that ‘60 Minutes stopped the experiment after 5 days ((In the manner of such charlatans, she is quite prepared to distort the statistics to make her feat seem more impressive.)) fearing I would be successful which could create problems for them as their intention was always to portray me as deluded…’ ((Interestingly, this claim has been removed from Jasmuheen’s main website, but you can read the cache here.))

In addition to the absurd beliefs that you’ve read so far, Jasmuheen further contends that due to her pranic sustenance her DNA has somehow altered from the standard two strands usual in all living things, to twelve, and now her body is able to ‘take up extra hydrogen’. ((Even if this nonsensical assertion had any merit, she has nowhere elaborated on why any of this should be desirable. Further, she has declined to allow a blood test to definitively settle this claim, saying: ‘I don’t know what the relevance for it (the blood test) is.’)) Also, in her capacity as ‘an Interdimensional Field Scientist’, she writes that ‘crop circles have always represented a Sacred Geometric Language that is designed to trigger various reactions and awakenings among various people’.

So to recap, Jasmuheen:

• Says she lives on solely on sunlight;

• Claims her DNA is different to all other living things;

• Believes that crop circles are alien messages;

Hmmm. Difficult to understand how anyone could perceive her as deluded.

Anyway, should you somehow receive an invitation from Jasmuheen to attend a Breatharian party, my suggestion is that you eat beforehand, because you know that all she’s likely to offer up in the way of refreshments is a light snack.

This morning, while listening to the radio I heard the following two items of interest:

The director of this year’s Young Writer’s Festival in Newcastle NSW, Nick Powell, was asked how the opening day went on Saturday and he declared enthusiastically that ‘it literally blew my mind!’

No, Nick, it really didn’t, because you’re talking to us on the radio. If it literally blew your mind you’d most likely be in a cold metal cabinet with a tag on your toe, and someone would be sloshing liberal quantities of Clorox over the Writer’s Festival office floors. It figuratively blew your mind, perhaps, and it seems to me that if it is incumbent on anyone to know difference between those two things it should be the director of a Writer’s Festival for chrissakes.

On the same show, reviewer Geoff Page dispensed some pearls of wisdom about poet Jane Gibian’s new collection Ardent.

There is considerable range here, from the mystery of the title poem… through certain semi-satirical works… to several impressive haiku and tanka sequences. These latter forms can be a trap for younger poets who take them to be easier to write than they are, especially since, quite reasonably these days, we ignore the strict syllabic requirements of the Japanese.

Whoa there boy!

When did it become quite reasonable to abandon the strict syllabic requirements of the haiku? I said it before about limericks, and I’ll say it again about haiku: you can forget all about the structure of the form if you like, but then the thing you’re writing is not a haiku!. It is a short non-rhyming poem. Or, being charitable maybe, a short haiku-like poem. BUT IT IS NOT A HAIKU.

Allow me to draw an analogy: an elephant is a big heavy grey mammal with four solid legs and a fearsome demeanour. If we ‘ignore the strict descriptive requirements’ of the biologists we could call it a rhinoceros. Indeed, an elephant even bears some superficial resemblances to a rhinoceros, but I put it to you Mr Page: you may disagree with the biologists about what it is, but that does not actually change anything in reality.

So. A traditional Japanese haiku is a poetry form such that three lines consist of five syllables, seven syllables and then five again. There are many variations of this form that are similar to haiku, such as senryu, haibun, kimo, scifaiku and waka, but here’s the thing – they are variations, and are not called haiku! That’s why they have other names.

The Reverend sighs
When those who keep the language
Are its greatest foes