Tetherd Cow Ahead

Today, Mister Ffoeg wrote to Sister Veronica, enclosing a picture of himself (above) and the following missive:

From: misterffoeg@hotmail.com
Subject: ever seen a real halo?
Date: 27 March 2009 2:39:03 AM
To: sisterveronica@tetherdcow.com

the photo is not edited at all. i saved it at lowest quality in hopes of merely pixelating it and sure enough (i was on a weird kick at the time) i was manifesting this halo. it tastes great and it’s less filling.

I make the following observations:

•‘Ffoeg’ is ‘Geoff’ backwards. That’s pretty lame.

•Mr Ffoeg implies that Sister Veronica’s halo is not real. That’s impolite.

•Mr Ffoeg evidently ate his halo. That’s bizarre.

•Mr Ffoeg believes his halo is tasty and ‘less filling’. Less filling than what? A plate of cheese fries? Walkabout Soup? The Zero? That’s far fetched.

•Mr Ffoeg, despite being completely off his face on halo-juice, is able to correctly punctuate his emails (despite having no Shift key on his computer). That’s suspicious.

Make of all this what you will. Sister Veronica just looked at the email and said:

“Tool.”

By the tone of her voice, I assume that’s not meant to be a compliment. Please feel free to write to Mr Ffoeg and ask him further questions about the nutritional value (or just plain tastiness) of haloes. Perhaps he has recipes, and/or serving suggestions!*

___________________________________________________________________________

*Y’know, when I was a kid, I always thought ‘serving suggestion’ meant ‘add strawberries’. That’s because I only ever saw those words each morning on the Cornflakes packet, as I munched away at my breakfast.

___________________________________________________________________________

You know you’ll never survive the Apocalypse when you wonder for a moment why the spelling on your handwritten shopping list didn’t just auto-correct…

Srsly.

This man is Bernard d’Espagnat. He has a brain the size of a planet. In his extraordinary career, he has worked with other people with brains the size of planets, including Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr.*

D’Espagnat has just been awarded the 2009 Templeton Prize, which, in the words of the Templeton Foundation, is bestowed on a recipient for ‘progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities’, and carries with it a useful £1 million in pocket money.

M. d’Espagnat was given the prize this year for his work in quantum physics, and in particular for his assertions that ‘reality’ (whatever that is) can never be truly known by us in any meaningful sense. Crucially, in regard to the Templeton Prize, his conclusions about what he has discovered in his research veer towards the metaphysical.

From New Scientist:

‘Unlike classical physics,’ d’Espagnat explains, ‘quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled.’

D’Espagnat subscribes to the third view and hypothesizes a ‘‘veiled reality’ that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly’. A veiled reality that encompasses what he refers to as a ‘Being’ and ‘a great, hypercosmic God’.

All things considered, I’m happy that the Templeton Foundation is spending their (evidently) vast fortunes in this way (let’s face it – the money could be going to Creationists). John Templeton, the founder of the organization, was the kind of religious person of whom we need many more. As a practising Presbyterian Christian he asked a question that all believers of religion should ask:

Why shouldn’t I try to learn more? Why shouldn’t I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn’t I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more.

Indeed.

It puzzles me, however, that M. d’Espagnat, genius that he indisputably is, seems unable to grasp what is apparently too much of a subtlety of his ‘veiled’ reality; if it exists why must it imply the existence of his hypercosmic God, rather than infer instead that our human brains (planet-size or otherwise) may simply not be capable of understanding the true nature of things? This, to me, seems to be a far likelier explanation than the unsupported jump to the notion of a mysterious and inscrutable creator.†

Perplexingly, d’Espagnat himself seems to be within stepping distance of the same conclusion. He said, on receipt of the prize:

I feel myself deeply in accordance with the Templeton Foundation’s great, guiding idea that science does shed light (on spirituality). In my view it does so mainly by rendering unbelievable an intellectual construction claiming to yield access to the ultimate ground of things with the sole use of the simple, somewhat trivial notions everybody has.

It would appear, then, that he is merely replacing a simple (or trivial) faith in God with a complicated one built on the scaffold of a type of physics and mathematics that very few people understand. Sure, it’s not the thunder-and-lightning enemy-smiting God of the Evangelical Christians/Muslims/Hebrews, but it comes from exactly the same irrational place; the hubris of humans and our belief that the Universe revolves around us.

It seems, then, that in this realm we’ve not really made many advances since Copernicus after all.

___________________________________________________________________________

*If those names don’t mean anything to you, they should. They are among the brightest and most insightful scientists we have ever known.

†Which, in any case, is a completely simplistic and futile supposition – as I’ve said elsewhere: if you want to make that assessment, then you may as well suppose that you, your world and all your memories were created by that God yesterday, fully formed and intact – how would you ever know? It’s the same kind of intellectual pursuit. From there, a raft of fanciful worlds become possible and reality unravels like ball of wool in the paws of a kitten.

___________________________________________________________________________

Faithful Acowlytes King Willy and Pil have been been on a pilgrimage to Cow Central these last few days, and lawks, I thought they’d never leave what a fabtacular time we’ve all had. There was gingerbread, and whisky and birthday cake and all manner of shenanigans. Hopefully, by now they’ve made it back through Sydney Airport without being assaulted by biker gangs and are kicking back with extra spicy Virgin Marys on their terrace.

While they were here, they were amused to discover that I have my own brand of milk.

This is something that, until they pointed it out, I’d comprehensively failed to notice (that sometimes happens when one is the spokesperson for a supernatural being). Henceforth let it be known that here at The Cow, not only do we have plenty of The Milk of Human Kindness, but it’s low fat as well!

One of my favoured blog visits is Matt’s Musings, where artist and machinima magician Matt Kelland muses often on things that pin the Interest-O-Meter. Recently, after having indulged in the old internet meme of ‘Making Your Own Record Cover’, Matt was musing about whether designers might find themselves eventually replaced by some kind of quasi-random system for generating ‘artwork’.

If you’ve not played the Record Cover Game game it goes like this:

1: Go here, to get a random image – picture #3, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

2: Go here to get a random Wikipedia article – this will be the name of your artist.

3: Go here to get a random quote, the last four or five words of which will be the name of your album.

Combine the ingredients in a photo editing app such as Photoshop, and voila! – Instant Design Skillz and a new Number One with a Bullet!

Here’s a nifty example which I just made according to those rules:

Cool! Not something I’d pick up in a record shop, probably, but you never know – I’m pretty fond of Arab Pop…

But as I mentioned to Matt, my feeling is that designers are safe for a while yet. Even in the ‘Mafitah al-Janan’ effort above (which in my opinion would have been rejected by all but the most feeble of A&R people) I’ve employed at least a little discrimination… it’s hard not to want to use at least some slightly tasteful fonts and a complementary colour scheme.

I told Matt that I was skeptical of much true artistic merit in the Record Cover Game – the dice are far too loaded. Using the above rules, you get offered a generally high standard of images, excellent quotes and the possibility of some unusual and meaningful parings – the path to this point has been well-and-truly paved by creative people. Next, stir in a little of your own artiness (even the tiniest amount…) and, well, it’s not unreasonable to expect a half-decent outcome. But, I speculated, what if you truly randomize the process. What if you try and take out any innate taste? Do you still come up with anything you’d want to display on your cd shelf? And I spun up a few examples which I posted in Matt’s comments.

They were SO terrible, in fact, that I actually started having fun… so now, in true TCA fashion, I’m reinventing the Record Cover Meme.

Acowlytes! This is your quest: go now and make the very WORST record cover you can. A cover that would ensure your future as a designer was well and truly dead, buried and pissed upon.

These are the NEW rules:

1: Go here, to get a random image. Image #3 – no matter what it is – will be your album cover.

2: Go here to get a random website – the first 3 or 4 words of the first link on the page is the name of your band.

3: Go here to get a random clich̩ Рthe third one on the list is the name of your album.

4: Arrange the elements in a photo editing app such as Photoshop according to the following restrictions: try to pick a random font and a random colour for each of the titles (how you opt to do this is up to you, but I trust you to play fair and try and be as truly random as possible).

5: You must put your artist name along the TOP of the image, and your album name along the BOTTOM. No creative placement allowed!

Maybe you’ll arrive at something as appalling appealing as this:

Or this:

I certainly hope so. Put it where we can see it and post a link in Comments. Let’s show Matt what kind of world we’d have without anyone at the design controls…†

___________________________________________________________________________

† In fact, these monstrosities are frighteningly similar to the kinds of ‘artwork’ you see in those annoying leaflets people shove under your front door. Coincidence?

BTW – I totally swear I made those two bad ‘covers’ using the rules outlined above – the way the title in the second one interacted with the text on the image was entirely random. Sometimes random can be mighty entertaining.

___________________________________________________________________________

Today I was gratified to receive in the email a generous incitement from ‘Martha’ to SUPERSIZE my TOMATOES!! In order to persuade me that this was a great idea, Martha was offering me ‘3 GIANT Tomato Trees’ for ONLY $10.00! And, if I ORDERED TODAY, Martha was also willing to send me ‘3 big early hybrid tomatoes as our gift!’

Yes, I was a bit confused too – am I paying for three tomato trees, or getting 3 tomato trees as a gift? Or am I paying for tomato plants and getting 3 tomatoes as the gift? Who ships tomatoes? What is a giant tomato tree anyway? Is it like a giant beanstalk? Do tomatoes grow on trees? All these things were swirling around in my head as I gazed at the big picture of…

Wha?

Wheat? And is that…?

Opium poppies! Yes! Opium poppies! See for yourself:

Am I right, or am I right?! Opium poppies and wheat! Or perhaps it’s rye, wildly incubating ergot fungus? Hang on, where are these people anyway? I’m going to write to them…

Datura street? Datura street? C’mon! That’s made up…

Nope. There it is. In Florida (thank you, Oh Wondrous Google Street View!)

So. People selling ‘giant tomato plants’ and opium poppies with LSD, from Datura St, in Florida. I’m almost inclined to send off the $10 to see what I get back…