Tetherd Cow Ahead

I haven’t heard much from Peter Popoff for a few months, but this week (perhaps fearing that the Easter Bunny might steal his thunder) Prophet Pete has showered me with some very imaginative gifts indeed.

Yes, this exciting ‘audit controlled package’ was full to the brim with Popoff Fun. First of all, with this latest epistle, he’s delivered me some ACTUAL MONEY! Yes, that’s right folks, you read correctly. Peter Popoff sent me money!

Well, OK, so it’s only two pennies, but on balance, Peter Popoff has given me money, and I haven’t given him anything (well, except for some nard, maybe, but I already had that to hand). Prophet Pete also pretended to give me a much larger amount of money…

…but even a foreigner like me is not going to fall for that one. Aside from the fact that Ulysses S. Grant already appears on the US $50 bill, this supposed Ten Thousand Dollar Drinking Voucher is approximately twice the size it should be, and shiny. Nevertheless, I will be attempting to put it to good use, as you will see in a forthcoming edition of The Cow.

Diving back into the awesome lucky dip of Easter goodies I uncovered a BLOOD RED BRACELET…

…or, what we have come to know on my planet as ‘a piece of red wool’. I am supposed to tie this around my wrist and do something or other (I’ve just stopped reading the instructions on these damn things – they are so brainless it’s like reading, oh, the Bible or Scientology literature or something).

OK. Moving on. Next we have a small plastic sachet containing a communion wafer and what looks (and smells) like strawberry jelly crystals.

Now, what happens with these…? Dissolve powder… blood of Christ… body of Christ… receive these symbols… the usual Christian hocus pocus, rendered even more ludicrous in light of the fact that we’re dealing with STRAWBERRY SYRUP!

I’m beginning to think that Peter Popoff is actually doing the world a favour by illuminating the absurdity of Christian thinking. No wonder Christians try very hard to distance themselves from him – it’s all a bit close for comfort.

Now, you might think I’d be grateful getting such a swag of presents for Easter. But I’m not! I’m starting to think Prophet Pete is holding out on me. That maybe I’m not quite as ‘special’ as he’d have me believe. You will remember that Prophet Pete has already welched on his deal to send me Dead Sea Salt – well, in this latest offering he says:

No, Prophet Pete! I don’t remember getting the mustard seeds and the mirrors. And I’m a bit put out! I don’t feel I can possibly carry out your instructions when I’m not in possession of all the ingredients that I might need to conduct your spells prayers!

Still. The one remaining item in the letter almost makes up for it:

What you’re looking at here Cowpokes, in case it’s not as immediately obvious as it was to me, is DIRT FROM THE TOMB OF JESUS. Or, as Prophet Pete has it: ‘Earth from near the tomb of Jesus’. This obviously leaves some room for interpretation as to what ‘near’ actually encompasses. I’m thinking that in this case, ‘near’ may possibly be a brick quarry in inner city Sydney.*

I’m supposed to send the Jesus Dirt back to Peter Popoff so that he can ‘dip it in the Sea of Galilee’. Along with cash, unsurprisingly. I’m not sure if he intends to dip the cash in the Sea of Galilee, but with Prophet Pete, anything is possible.

Stay tuned Acowlytes. I think it’s time I wrote back to Prophet Peter Popoff and perhaps made a $10,000 dollar donation to his ministry!

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*Well, if you are talking in galactic scales, that’s pretty near!

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2 C. tomato juice
1 C. chopped spinach
½ C. chopped celery
1 small chopped cabbage leaf

Place all ingredients in Vitamizer and Vitamize for 45 seconds. This drink when taken regularly is considered by doctors to be an excellent corrective for the system.

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*From the Semak Vitamizer Recipe Book

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Whilst browsing at a famous Melbourne market a little while back, Violet Towne made the astute purchase of this Semak Vitamizer recipe book from the 1950s. The cover illustration of a young woman pouring milk into a jug full of orange and carrot juice only hints at the wonders inside…

After some technical explanation of how the Vitamizer actually works (‘The four little blades, which resemble a ship’s propellor, are sharpened and set in such a manner that, when they revolve at 18,000 revolutions per minute, they set up a violent flow or current surging through the contents of the container…’) a photographic spread introduces you to the kinds of treats you might be able to conjure up, now that you’ve purchased your Semak Vitamizer.

Truly, with the Semak, the world is your oyster puree!

Well, I know you want to get started, so let’s have a look at some of the ‘lovely Vitamizer dishes illustrated on this page’. The first offering is a serving of something so redolent of ten-day-old wallpaper-paste residue that it had to be garnished with parsley in order to have any chance at all of resembling food:

Yes, I know, a valiant attempt, but still mysteriously unappetizing. Ooh, and what’s this? Some crackers smeared with faeces and topped with leaves:

I know your mouths are watering at the very thought of walking up to the canapé table to be greeted with such a festive presentation! Am I right? Well the delights are only beginning. Next on the menu, that staple of 1950s cuisine, Sewage Loaf…

…again embellished with a jaunty sprig of parsley in order to differentiate it from a hastily made mud brick. Of course, if you’re making things out of poo, there’s no real need to vitamize anything at all – just crumb the turds directly and arrange on lettuce…

… with parsley, it goes without saying. It keeps the breath fresh.

Moving on, a puzzling dish of custard and… er… small squares of toast? Sewage Loaf? Linoleum?

There’s no parsley, so maybe I’m on the wrong track and it’s not food at all. Home-made aquarium sealant, perhaps. Or a science experiment.

And don’t forget – if you run out of ideas on a food photo-shoot (especially if all the food looks like crap), you can always open some tinned spaghetti and pour that into one of the bowls. No-one will notice.

If you make it past this introductory page, some of the non-illustrated recipes that the Semak Vitamizer book goes on to offer (for which, thankfully, you have to summon up appropriate images in your mind’s-eye) include ‘Prune Satin’, ‘Date Milk Shake’ and ‘Tomato Corrective’. There is also ‘Fruit Mould’ and, for the very brave, ‘Mock* Pate de Foie Gras’ (really, don’t ask – suffice to say it includes a sprig of parsley).

And so we close our Semak Vitamizer recipe book for now. Just remember:

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*The ’50s was truly the decade of ‘mock’. When we were kids, my mum used to make us ‘mock fish’. It was actually just potato cakes or latkes. For some reason, for many years until I was set straight, I thought we were eating ‘mop’ fish. I maintain until this day that the things on the plate had more in common with mops than they did with fish.

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Yes Cowpokes, it’s finally here! As promised last post, Tetherd Cow Ahead is excited to bring you the ShooWooWoo™! With its patented Fractal Quantum Magnetic Levitatory Field, the ShooWooWoo™ fends off quacks and charlatans for up to a lifetime! Using revolutionary new scientific discoveries, the ShooWooWoo™ guarantees* that your website will never be pestered by mountebanks or snake-oil salesman again! Better still, the ShooWooWoo™ comes in a delightful shade of lavender and is absolutely FREE! To claim your FREE ShooWooWoo™ merely copy the code below and paste it into the appropriate part of the html for your sidebar or your page! No need to do anything else – images & links will appear as if by magic! But it’s NOT magic. Oh, no, no, no! It’s quantum physics and magnetic static with a little sprinkle of FeelyGood™!

<a target="_blank" title="Tetherd Cow Ahead" href="https://www.tetherdcow.com/?cat=76"><img src="https://www.tetherdcow.com/tetherdcow/cowimage/shoowoologo.jpg" alt="Shoo Woo Woo Logo" /></a>

Display your ShooWooWoo™ with pride! It will send all purveyors of Woo to the Tetherd Cow Ahead Skeptical Thinking category, where they can ruminate respectfully on their crimes against intelligence!

This has been another Tetherd Cow Ahead public service.

SPECIAL OFFER! Now also available in vibrant jade:

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*Does not cover underwater use.

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Does your pet have fleas? Do you laboriously de-flea Fido or Felix every few months, dreading the inevitable infestation when summer arrives? Is your flea comb blunt-to-the-blade from the amount of use it gets? Well my friend THOSE DAYS ARE GONE! The wondrous ShooTag™ has arrived! No more chemicals! No more squishing the little blood-suckers between your nails! No more WORK! Just clip on the ShooTag™ & kick back with another mojito as the miracle of ‘science’ brings its quantum electro-dynamic guns to bear on the field of pest control!

It is to employ teh Sarcasm.

Yes folks, it’s another nutty scam from the same mindset that brought you unlimited free energy, clairvoyant pens and magic water. Swinging in with that Ol’ Reliable of pseudoscience, ‘magnetism’, ShooTag™ uses a ‘three dimensional electromagnetic static field embedded in a magnetic strip’ to rid your pet from pests for up to 4 months! I know – it sounds incredible! Because it is! Entirely incredible, as in, ‘not credible’.

Let’s examine some of the claims that the purveyors of ShooTag™ offer up on their site. This is a terrific opportunity to observe the workings of a classic con in action:

First, pick an outcome that is difficult to determine in a real world situation: Of course, you know when your pet has fleas – it’s fairly obvious. You might possibly even know when your pet doesn’t have any fleas at all – but that’s a lot harder to tell. The gamut of possibilities between those two extremes, though, is highly difficult to gauge outside a controlled laboratory setting. It’s the rich, vast exploitable landscape of anecdotal evidence. Perfect! Line the suckers up!

Next, make some extravagant but hard-to-disprove claims: ‘ShooTag™ combines cutting-edge science and technology to produce a “green” product that emits electromagnetic frequencies to keeps pests at away!’; It ‘uses electromagnetic frequencies to create a protective barrier from pests that lasts up to 4 months!.

Let’s examine some of those words: What evidence exists to say that electromagnetic frequencies keep pests away? There’s none that I could find (except on the websites of people selling products similar to ShooTag™). Why are electromagnetic frequencies ‘green’ here, but ‘toxic’ when you use your mobile phone? How come the barrier ‘lasts up to 4 months’? If it’s a magnet, shouldn’t it last forever? Or, if it is an electromagnet and has batteries, then couldn’t you replace them? Are we supposed to believe that the elecromagnetic properties of ShooTag™ sort of fade away over time? Could it be that, after four months you have to (gasp) buy another ShooTag™? And those two words ‘up to’… ‘Up to’ could be anywhere from a couple of days onward… It’s advertising-speak piled on hogwash piled on flim-flam.

The next step: blind them with science: There’s a tab at the top of the ShooTag™ home page that takes us to ‘The Science Behind ShooTag™’. Let’s see now… hmmm. ‘Atoms are mostly space…’ yes, well, OK…‘magnetic static…’ (Magnetic static? What the…?), ‘quantum and gravitational fields…’ (is this a flea-control system or a warp drive?) and best of all ‘produces an expanding barrier effect, keeping away the targeted pests’. ‘Targeted pests’? The electromagnetism has the ability to discriminate?

In case it needs to be said, the ‘science’ offered up on this page is what I shall henceforth call ‘sausage science’, ie, baloney. The fancy-sounding phrases and the faux lesson in quantum electrodynamics are as nonsensical as a jabberwocky. The word ‘quantum’ itself has become the modern equivalent of ‘magnetism’; a mysterious force that [cue theremin] ‘No-one understands!’ Heck, why shouldn’t it repel fleas!

But wait! There’s more! What’s this over in the corner here – a scientific document! It’s a pdf of a report to something called the Quantum Agriculture Journal by a Prof William Nelson. ((This has been removed from the Shoo!TAG site after my criticism. I’ll let that action speak for itself.)) Let’s do a Search™ on the ol’ Quantum Agriculture Journal… that sounds like something I might want to subscribe to! Well, well – sadly (if a little predictably), only two lonely links ((I guess I’m giving them three now…)), both of them pointing back to the ShooTag site. And as for ‘Prof’ Nelson… let’s just say that in the Quantum Hoodjy Goodjy Stakes he’s ‘got form’. ((You might, for amusement, like to look up his Xrroid Quantum Medical Consciousness Interface System. If anyone suffers from xrroids, it’s this guy, given the amount of utter crap that he generates.)); The ‘scientific’ document itself (if you can be bothered) is a hare-brained ramble through a whole mess of abracadabra, beginning with some descriptions of chaotic attractors, jumping through magnetic resonance imaging and the electrical sensitivity of sharks, and ending up with the conductivity of chemicals in cells. It’s the most meaningless agglomeration of waffle that I’ve attempted to read in a very long while. If you’ve ever even seen a scientific paper, you know this ain’t one of those.

You might think, from reading through the ShooTag™ site that this is all a bit of harmless misguided opportunism, but Faithful Acowlytes, these disingenuous swindlers must know that what they sell is crap. The language they use, the fake ‘journal’ they invoke, their diffuse claims, the meaningless testimonials ((These ‘real-life’ people (all from Texas it would seem) are credible exactly why?)) – all these things are the conjurings of cynical rip-off merchants. If they have science, they’d show it. If this thing worked, malaria doctors from Bolivia to Eritrea would be all over it (otherwise, you’ve got to be thinking they either don’t know about it… um… or they are willfully letting their patients die. Why? Oh, that’s right: it’s all an Evil Plot by Big Pharma!)

Anyways, Cowpokes, fear not. Here at TCA Labs the boffins have been hard at work to remedy this appalling situation. Stay tuned for our Part 2 of this post when we will be bringing you the TCA ShooWooWoo™…

ADDENDUM: More about ShooTag™, including a ‘defense’ of the product from ShooTag™’s CEO here.

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Thanks (if that’s the right word) to Atlas for bringing ShooTag™ to the attention of The Cow

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