Tetherd Cow Ahead

The Continuing Misfortunes of Simple Graphics Man ~

#26: The Worrisome Weapon.

SGM has no sooner recovered from The Phantasmagorical Phenomenon than he is tempted to activate a conveniently located Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator. Or something. I mean, who has a clue what that thing is? And yet, SGM steps right up and sticks his hand in it.

Way to go SGM!

___________________________________________________________________________

Photographed by Pil, our special SGM Correspondent.

___________________________________________________________________________

a·nal·o·gy [uh-nal-uh-jee] –noun (plural analo-gies)

1. A similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based.

___________________________________________________________________________

Definition courtesy Dictionary.com

___________________________________________________________________________

Tonight all sensible Australians cry tears of joy! The Weasel is no more! Begone you horrid little man, and let us attempt to repair the damage you have done.

Americans – take a leaf. You know what you have to do.

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I’ve just encountered ‘the world’s first interactive natural spring water – H²Om Water with Intention‘ Yes, you heard right: H²Om, as in Ommmmmmmm…

You can visit the website if you’ve got the stomach, but I’ll save you the pain: these people are selling bottled water that has been infused with nothing other than (supposedly) positive energy. From their blurb:

H²Om water with intention has revolutionized the bottled water industry by creating the world’s first vibrationally charged, interactive bottled water.

Got that? The water is vibrationally charged. And, to reiterate, it’s also interactive. If your Bullshit Detector Meters haven’t pinned yet, allow me to elaborate: the concept behind this water appears to be that those who drink it think about positive things while they are doing so, and then this somehow makes the water better. It’s not explained exactly how this works, nor in exactly what way the water is better. It’s just better.

The H²Om people have trademarked the slogan Think It While You Drink It™ a catchphrase that simultaneously illuminates the stupidity of the Trademarking system and the brainlessness of anyone who believes that a witless motto such as this actually means anything.

H²Om’s Vibration Hydrationâ„¢ (Oh Spare Me!â„¢) comes in seven great vibrational ‘flavours’: Love, Perfect Health, Gratitude, Prosperity, Will Power, Joy and Peace (I swear I’m not making this up).

Now I want to emphasize here, in case you didn’t get it, that these ‘flavours’ aren’t actually anything, like, flavoursome. If you buy a bottle of, say, ‘Joy’, it’s going to taste exactly the same as ‘Prosperity’- it’s only the vibrations that will be different (shit, I’m laughing as I type this – it’s so much like a parody I can’t actually believe that these people are serious).

Best of all, if this water doesn’t unequivocally bring you Peace/Joy/Love/Pretzels, H²Om have the ultimate escape clause: the water is interactive you loser – if it’s not working it’s your fault!

Still not with me? Still giving them the benefit of the doubt? Not laughing as much as me yet? Then read on:

As an added bonus, once our water is in the bottle, we play a restorative compositions of music, frequencies, and spoken word to the water.

Spoken word? Wha?

Nice water. Nice joyful pretty water. I love you water. You are the best water in the universe. Pretty pretty water. Lovely watery joyful prosperous water.

Seriously. It’s going to be something just like that, right?

Yup. If there’s one thing this website doesn’t lack it’s pages of incomprehensible waffle:

There are several distinctive vibrational frequencies that are infused in each bottle of H2Om. The First is the vibrational frequency of the label. The use of words, symbols and colors on the label. Each bottle contains the symbol of the Absolute “Om”. It also contains the vibratory word “Love” or “Perfect Health” etc. written on the label in many of the world’s languages. A specific color vibration has also been chosen for each bottle, this color coordinates with the corresponding chakra.

Now I know what you’re going to say – this is all flimsy bollocks and no-one is going to fall for this claptrap without some kind of basis in fact! Well, it’s just about now that H²Om wheels out its supporting ‘evidence’ for their miraculous product, and it comes in the form of an endorsement from a personage who was slated to appear in a future edition of the TCA Educational Series ‘Woo Woo Beliefs‘, a minimally educated Japanese ‘doctor’* Masaru Emoto. Some of you may have seen Dr Emoto’s claims promoted in the risible What the Bleep do We Know, a film that is rooted in reality to about the same extent as, oh, your average Warner Brothers’ Roadrunner cartoon.

To encapsulate, Dr Emoto has formulated some ideas (it’s absurd to call them hypotheses, since he doesn’t even pretend to adopt any form of scientific protocol) that water crystallizes in certain ways according to its response to people’s thoughts and emotions. That’s all you need to know – I’ll examine Dr Emoto further at a later time. It is sufficient to note that the H²Om people are so besotted by Dr Emoto that they have made him a partner in their company and are in the process of launching a new line with his imprimatur.

And you know what? I just bet they have the box-office attendance figures for What the Bleep framed on the H²Om office wall, with all the zeros emphasized in fluorescent hi-lighter.

Given the size of that demographic, it’s evident that H²Om’s marketing is dead accurate in one respect anyway: it is very obviously water with intention. Oh yeah. Intention of the people who make it to get filthy rich by exploiting the gullibility of simpletons.

___________________________________________________________________________

*His ‘doctorate’ in Alternative Medicine was awarded by an uncredited pay-your-way ‘university’ in India. Make of that what you will.

Thanks Sean for bringing the H²Om website to my attention.

___________________________________________________________________________

From time to time I get to musing on all manner of things here on The Cow, and today I bring you some thoughts about nature and self-similarity.

This morning at dawn I was lying half-awake listening to the song of a chirpy early-rising Turdus merula, better known as the Common Blackbird. The Blackbird was introduced to Australia, in Melbourne where I am now living, in the 1850s as part of the regrettable We-Wish-It-Was-More-Like-England makeover that the colonists were hell-bent on giving this completely un-Englandlike continent.

The Blackbird’s song is very pretty and very recognizable – listen to the end part of this sample:*

What I realized as I was listening though, was that the little guy† wasn’t just doing the same exact phrase over and over – there were little variations each and every time – just like he was improvising on his little blackbirdy theme. No two riffs were exactly alike.

This got me to speculating about another well-known natural phenomenon in which no two elements are exactly alike, but are very similar in structure and beauty and precision: the snowflake.

And so I began to wonder if the song of the Common Blackbird might in fact be the aural equivalent of the crystalline structure of the snowflake.‡

I don’t really know why I should have made that connection, but there you go. Put it down to my hypnopompic state if you like. But I leave you with this thought: self-similarity is rife in nature. It is embedded everywhere from the mathematics of fractals to the formation of snow crystals and the songs of birds. Its presence is felt in almost every natural process somehow or other. Think about it: it really does not need to be this way. All things considered, the natural world could be completely random. And yet order arises spontaneously everywhere it can.

The reasons for this remain a beautiful mystery.

___________________________________________________________________________

*This recording by Fred Van Gessel. I pinched it, so for my atonement I urge you to go buy his recording Bird Calls of the Greater Sydney Region from the Australian Museum Shop.

___________________________________________________________________________

‡ (And Find Out Something You Didn’t Already Know In The Process)

We’ve played this game before, but it continues to amuse me. What do the following images have in common?

A picture of the great astronomical clock of Besançon.

A picture of Hampstead Heath.

A map showing the location of Weldon Spring Heights, Missouri.

A Picture of David Essex.

An odd sepia picture of a thin Santa.

That’s right – they are all pictures from the first page retrieved by Google Images on a search of the digits that make up my birthday. Try it – it’s fun! Go to Google Images and enter your birth date as six figures*: ddmmyy (or mmddyy if you are an illogical American). Pick any five pictures from the first page of results only. Then post them somewhere we can see! Hey. That sounds like a meme! Maybe I can start one. OK, I tag:

•Sara Sue
•jedimacfan
•Cissy Strutt
•Phoebe Fay
•Tequila Mockingbird

Post links back here in the Comments. Tag someone else and let’s see if we can start an internet phenomenon. Be sure to tell them that The Cow sent you!

Play if you want. It will affect the universe in no way if you don’t.†

___________________________________________________________________________

*Six figures seems, intriguingly, to be the optimum number to return the most unrelated bunches of images, but still get a reasonable number of hits. Fewer numbers result in too many images that are related in some way, and more numbers return a reduced field of possibilities. I’d love to know the maths behind this…

†Actually, it may affect the universe in profound ways. There is really no way of telling.

___________________________________________________________________________