Tetherd Cow Ahead

As you have no doubt already intuited, this is going to be one of my very rare movie reviews. And I’ll say it now – it’s a long one. I make no apology, because in this case, I’m really going against both critical opinion and audience acceptance (and probably the Oscar for Best Film) so you can be sure I will say controversial and entertaining things.

Yesterday I went to see Martin Scorsese’s fêted kid’s film Hugo. I made a special effort to see this film, and in 3D, because, you see I had been told two things about it (which turned out to be completely untrue): the first was that it’s ‘not really a kid’s film’, and the second that the 3D ‘is really great’.

Consequently, I will split this review into two parts, although there will inevitably be some overlapping. First, the 3D.

As many of you know, I have come to hate 3D in the movies. I didn’t always – I’ve long been a fan of the old anaglyph black & whites like ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ and ‘It Came from Outer Space’, and I have a fond spot for André de Toth’s seminal House of Wax and Hitchcock’s wonderful Dial M for Murder. These films, and others like them through the fifties and sixties, made admirable and necessary explorations into what seems like a logical direction for cinema to go. Unfortunately, there are many, many complications with making 3D work in the moving image domain, and those films never really conquered them. As a result, 3D was, decades ago, relegated onto a back shelf of cinema history, and despite several optimistic attempts to air it out through the 70s and 80s, it has never managed to get traction on the big screen. The difficulty in making 3D acceptable to an audience has always been blamed on the inadequacies of the technology – which is a fair criticism to a point – but as Hugo demonstrates very clearly, that’s only part of the problem.

Part of the problem it is though, and my experience with Hugo was no exception. This presentation was made using an active shutter system (XpanD, specifically) which basically entails a pair of 3D glasses that rapidly blank out alternating left/right images coming from the screen in such a way as to direct the appropriate image to the appropriate eye and so achieve stereoscopy. It is probably a superior system to the polarized X/Y axis technology (which I find supremely annoying) but only just. The first irritation became apparent as soon as the movie began – the damn glasses were greasy and dirty. So not only was I getting a dim murky image due to the attenuated luminance that 3D inflicts anyway, it was further degraded by great smears of refracted light in my peripheral vision. And try as I might, I couldn’t clean the glasses with anything I had to hand. So what – now everytime I go to the movies I have to remember to take a bottle of lens cleaner and a box of Kleenex with me? ((Later, as I left the cinema, I saw the staff frantically re-smearing all the XpanD glasses in preparation for the next show. I should have paid more attention to how they were doing this, but my eyes were still trying to adjust to seeing normally. My fleeting impression was that they were just wiping the damn things with a rag that was no doubt saturated with popcorn butter from all the glasses of the last five sessions. As with many aspects of modern cinema, the ‘advances’ in technology are mostly just creating more work for already underpaid people.)) This was almost distracting enough to make me want to leave thirty seconds into the film. When I pay $17 to see a movie, ((Violet Towne actually shouted me to this screening, so it was really her money. Sorry honey.)) I want to see the movie, not hazy tenebrous images filtered through the remnants of some kid’s hot-popcorn-butter-smudged fingerprints. Still, I had been told the 3D was ‘great’ in this film, so I persevered. I had, however, been distracted enough to miss the film’s set up. Good one 3D! Within a few minutes the major drawback of the active shutter system technology became apparent. The refresh rate of the LCD blanking technology is well below the frame rate of projected movie film, ((Unless the film is projected at a higher frame rate. Some systems are embracing a new standard speed of 48 or 60 frames per second to go some way to alleviating the refresh rate flicker problem. We shall see if that makes it any more bearable.)) and this creates an unpleasant strobing effect whenever there is a quick camera movement, or a bright, rapidly moving object in the frame. ((Moving 3D film images tend to have a problem with strobing on horizontal moving objects anyway, for very technical reasons to do with the way our brains detect rapidly moving hard edges.)) And guess what – this film has lots of falling snow. Little particles of bright 3D snow that zip and dart and STROBE across your field of vision. Horrifically distracting. And it hurts us, it hurts our eyeses, precious. Come ON, guys. Moving pictures have spent a century contriving to look fluid and seamless and now you expect us to put up with this kind of crap? To make matters worse, the opening sequences of Hugo are crammed with fast tracking sequences, fast action and rapid cutting. Scorsese flings the camera around like it’s a ball on a paddle bat. Technically speaking, for the moment 3D does not tolerate this kind of thing very well. ((And the corollary is that, for the moment, you should avoid doing it.)) It’s puzzling that Martin Scorsese, a filmmaker of extraordinary accomplishment, has not picked up on this fact.

And it’s here that I knew with absolute certainty that the 3D in this film was going to be anything but ‘great’. Oh, there’s a LOT of 3D, no question about it. Every shot is crammed with 3D-isms. There’s smoke and snow and dust and ashes and sparkles and cogs and dogs and shafts and fog and just about everything you could ask for to add visual depth to the image. It’s just a pity that it doesn’t add any other kind of depth. I can almost hear Marty screaming ‘There’s not enough 3D in that shot! More CG smoke – I don’t want them thinking I’m some kind of modern-day de Toth!’ ((André de Toth, the director of House of Wax was famously blind in one eye, so he could not actually see the 3D effect in the film. He evidently relied on the rest of his crew to make sure it was viable.)) The people who had been raving that the 3D of Hugo was ‘great’ just meant ‘there’s a lot of it’ – not unlike the people who tell me they think the sound in a movie was ‘great’ when what they actually mean is that it was ‘loud’.

Now, one of the the knock-on effects of having extravagant lashings of 3D in every shot is that your eyes want to look at stuff. In the real world this is what happens. Something moves in your field of view, you look at it. People talk, you look at them. A boat on a lake in the distance is pretty, you look at it. What never occurs in the real world, however, is that these things all take place within seconds of one another in a rapid replacement effect. There are two major catastrophic blunders that you can make with 3D, therefore, and Hugo makes them again and again and again and again.

The first is that you can’t just cut from one shot to another shot without any regard for where people’s eyes might be. In flat 2D filmmaking, we’ve spent decades honing our skills in such a way as to guide the eyes and ears of the audience in a carefully choreographed ballet of vision and sound. The art of montage – the ‘editing’ of the film – is an integral part of good filmmaking, and it’s one of the things that you study intensely as a young filmmaker. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor, is an acknowledged doyen of the craft and it’s a mystery to me how the pair of them managed to hack their way through this film so badly. It’s almost as if Thelma said to Scorsese: ‘Marty, I don’t give a flying fuck about this 3D fad. I’m just cutting the film like I usually do.’ ((Like Tim Burton apparently did with Alice in Wonderland.)) The first ten minutes of the film had my eyes popping back and forward, left and right, in and out, up and down until I felt like Marty Feldman at a tennis match. No wonder people complain about 3D giving them headaches.

The puzzle here is that, again, it’s almost like the people who made this film have never bothered to watch, or learn from, the 3D films that have come before. ((I can’t believe, for instance, that Scorsese has taken nothing from Hitchcock’s masterful use of 3D in Dial M for Murder. Hitchcock only did this one film in 3D, and audiences of the time never saw it that way because – does this sound familiar? – they had tired of the 3D fad and the film was released flat to maximise its profitability. Nevertheless, he embraced the potential of the idea and absorbed it almost effortlessly into his filmic arsenal. As a result it was, and remains, one of the best uses of 3D to date, and I pine for one of the current batch of 3D advocates to come up with something half as well realised.)) 3D demands a particular kind of language just as 2D does, and you simply can’t barge into it with the same techniques that have served you in the past. For a start, it necessitates an understanding of what your eyes actually do when they look at things in the real world. The only time, for instance, that you need to snap your focus from a person talking in the middle distance to a big thing close to your face is when something extremely unexpected or confronting happens. In real life, this mostly causes you to jump backwards and knock your beer over. Now, when making a film, if it’s not your intention to smack the audience in the face like this, DON’T DO IT. And certainly don’t do it repeatedly, because the other problem here is that it makes your eyes do things they never, ever do in normal circumstances. Geez, for the first time in my life I feel like I could easily teach Martin Scorsese a thing or two about filmmaking. That should just NOT be happening.

The other appalling 3D fumble that is committed in this film, often in lock-step with the oafish cutting mentioned above, has to do with focus. This is a mistake that has been committed in every single one of the recent crop of 3D live action films ((But not with animated films. I wonder if you can work out why?)) and it makes me mad every time I see it. It’s the act of having things in the frame out of focus. Now, in 2D, we’re used to seeing this technique. It’s not a function of natural vision, but is a trick of photography, and it is used to direct the eye to something, or to throw it into relief. It works in 2D only because watching things on a 2D plane is not realistic, and so we have learned non-realistic tricks to help us make sense of the 2D image. The problem is it simply does not work in 3D. This is because – I hope you’re paying attention here Marty – we do not see things out of focus in real life! ((Unless of course we are myopic and don’t have our spectacles on. But I don’t need to tell you that no-one actually seeks out this state.))

Human vision is an amazing thing. It’s mostly amazing because only a small part of it is to do with optics. The rest has to do with a complicated system of visual processing in the brain. As far as the brain is concerned, things are only ever out of focus when there’s a problem. This is because our brain modifies our visual apparatus constantly, racking focus, pulling aperture, adjusting stereoscopic convergence, tilting and panning, and then gathering the information from this process to provide what appears to be one seamless binocular vision of our circumstances. Critically, it does this by ignoring a lot of stuff. One of the the biggest visual distractions it has learnt to ignore is anything that is out of focus. In your normal day-to-day life, you are very seldom aware of things that are out of focus.

Go on – try it now. Look around the room and try and see something in your field of view that is out of focus. You can’t do it! Whether it’s on your desk, over near the piano or out the window, your brain is constantly working overtime to make sure everything is properly focussed for you to look at. Things that it doesn’t focus on, it just doesn’t pay attention to. ((If you’re not following me here, you’ve misunderstood – as have most modern filmmakers attempting 3D – a fundamental mechanism of human vision. We do not see the world like a camera sees it. We have spent a century ‘learning’ how to see flat 2D images as portrayals of reality, but this is essentially not the way we see things in reality. Even if you have vision in only one eye, and are unable to resolve stereoscopy, you still don’t see the world like a camera does. It’s all to do with the fact that a camera is a purely optical system, and human vision is a computer-enhanced information gathering system.)) If people move in and out of your view, you can’t help but focus on them. If some fireworks go off outside, you focus on them. In fact, your world is in focus ALL THE TIME, if your brain can make it like that. And when it can’t (such as when someone thrusts a newspaper in your face and you have to step back to resolve it) you find it annoying and inconvenient. So filmmakers: WHY ARE YOU DOING IT IN 3D MOVIES? ((To try and illustrate the problem with a 2D analogy: imagine you are watching a film in a very wide anamorphic ratio – you know, Cinemascope or something. Now imagine that there are two characters talking. One thing you never do – unless you’re doing it specifically to call attention to something – is to put the two characters on the far left and right of the screen and cut between them as they talk. Why? Because the audience would be forced to snap their heads back and forth as the actors appeared first on the very left of the screen, and then on the right. It would quickly become very tiring and intrusive. We’ve evolved all kinds of film-making language to make sure that audiences aren’t popped out of the movie with irritations such as this.))

Let me give you an example of how horrible it is in Hugo ((This is just one example of many instances of it in this film – far more than I have seen in recent 3D offerings. James Cameron did it numerous times in Avatar, but only in the live action sequences. It never happens in the computer modelled scenes. I’ll leave you to reflect on why that is…)) In one scene, the eponymous Hugo and his friend Isabelle are standing in a clock tower looking out over Paris at the illuminated Eiffel Tower. The camera is behind them and tracks back. The focus is on the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel tower is right in the centre of the frame. Hugo and Isabelle, in close foreground, are out of focus. This is irritating, but acceptable for a bit, since they are dimly lit and you are, after all, being directed to look at the bright Eiffel Tower. Then Mr Scorsese does something that is entirely acceptable – artistic and clever, even – in 2D filmmaking, but is brain-achingly stupid in 3D. He racks focus from the Eiffel Tower to our protagonists. In 2D, this would have the effect of drifting with our attention from the pretty-but-irrelevant centrepiece of the shot, back to the storyline. Movies do it all the time. So much so, that it is, indeed, a real skill to know at exactly which moment to force the focus pull in order to be in sync with the audience’s point of awareness. But CRITICALLY, this is a trick of 2D photography. In real stereoscopic human vision, we just don’t interpret the world like that, and so if someone does it in a 3D film, our brains are forced to do a very strange thing: we need to recompute the environment to try and make sense of it. In my brain, at that moment, it went something like this:

‘Oh, that’s a pretty shot of the Eiffel Tower. Weird out-of-focus people in the foreground, but whatever. Look at that beautiful model of Paris with all the lights on the Tower. I wonder if it really looked like that in the 1930s, electric light must… WHAT THE FUCK – EVERYTHING’S GONE OUT OF FOCUS. Oh. I see. I’m supposed to be looking at the actors now.’

To put it succinctly, if we were involved in this kind of scene in reality, we might look at the Tower, look at Paris, look at the kids, look back at the Tower – whatever. CRUCIALLY, nothing would ever be out of focus, especially the brightly lit BIG thing right in the middle of frame.

‘But wait just a goddamn minute!’ I hear you say. ‘It’s a movie, and movies are not reality. Movies do stylized tricky things all the time, and that’s OK! What about close-ups and Dutch tilts and zooms and stuff? They’re nothing like ‘reality’!’

Close-ups and Dutch tilts and zooms and jump cuts and a whole arsenal of cinematic hocus pocus has arisen, just like the focus rack, in the domain of the artificiality of 2D photographic image. They are techniques that ask us to make mental adjustments to the way we view a flat, already artificial, world. We simply cannot expect them to translate into a 3 dimensional space. They might, but if they don’t, we shouldn’t just go ahead and use them anyway, which is what’s happening here.

The mental disorientation with the focus shift that I’ve outlined above all happened very rapidly and quite subliminally it is true, but the significant point is that a contrivance of technique popped me straight out of the movie. As filmmakers, we spend every working moment trying to make sure that we don’t pop people out of the willing suspension of disbelief. To do so is the greatest single moviemaking crime you can commit. If we are to continue with this 3D thing we really need to find new ways to direct the attention of the audience, methods that don’t go against everything that evolution has wrought in us from the day that some mud-dwelling crustacean discovered that two eyes are better than one for avoiding being eaten. ((Lest you think I am talking out of my ass with all this stuff, consider that in my job as a professional sound designer, I have already been there. Sound people have been adjusting to spatial changes in film sound since we went from mono to stereo back in the 1940s. And now, with ‘surround sound’ we have in fact been dealing with a 3D environment for four decades. We’ve learnt a thing or two about what you can and cannot do. One thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that many things that were totally acceptable in mono soundtracks just do not work in a full 3 dimensional spatial environment. We’ve had to learn new ways of making things work. And we’ve had to learn those new ways without making audiences hate the film because the sound hurt their ears.))

There are a dozen other types of similar terrible blunders of technique in Hugo: an extreme closeup of an eye looking through keyhole, where the keyhole is out of focus and the eye is sharp and crisp. (NO! Your eye would never see it like that! It feels WRONG because it IS wrong!); a horrible step-zoom where the focal plane changes every time a cut is made, forcing you to re-converge your eyes in a cascade of unpleasant jumps; ugly dissolves with convergence mis-alignments; ((Human eyes have a real problem with the kinds of artificial convergence thrust upon them in 3D photography. Again, this is a technical issue of human vision, and so is complicated to explain, but basically, when we look at objects we expect our eyes to refocus and re-converge stereoscopically at the same time. In the cinema, the focal plane is always constant (the screen) and the convergence is the only thing that changes. This is highly unnatural. We can do it, of course – otherwise photographic stereoscopy wouldn’t work – but it makes our eyes attempt to behave in a way that they would never naturally need to. It’s bad enough that movies force us to try to do it, but it’s MUCH worse when they make us do it rapidly and repeatedly. If you are the kind of person who feels nauseous when watching 3D, this is almost certainly why.)) rapid camera moves where you lose your point of convergence, scrabble around to find it, and give up because the shot just cut anyway; objects that are in focus in one shot and then out of focus in the subsequent shot, forcing your brain to try and make sense of why that is.

I won’t go on about it anymore – I think you get the drift. Everybody seems to be aware that 3D in the movies has to conquer many technical problems before it is a valuable (or even bearable) addition to the cinema experience, but as Scorsese’s Hugo demonstrates vividly, filmmakers themselves are probably its biggest liability. I simply don’t care to have the spectacle of stereoscopy if it hurts my brain, and I believe that this is what a great many audience members feel too, even if they can’t put their fingers on exactly why they don’t like it. I’ll raise it as a point of interest, even if I don’t know if it has any bearing on things, but I find it curious that the people who are pushing hardest for 3D, and making most of the 3D films, are largely old-guard filmmakers like Cameron and Scorsese and Spielberg and, soon, Ridley Scott. ((I admit to having a great deal of trepidation about Prometheus after sitting through Hugo. I was looking forward to seeing what both these directors did with 3D, since each was equally voluble about how much he loved it, and, in Scott’s case about how he would ‘never do another film in 2D again’. Now I just think I’m going to see the same old blunders committed over and over. I’m even inclined to see the movie first in 2D, just in case it’s actually a good movie and the 3D wrecks it for me.)) I’m not entirely sure why this should be – maybe because these guys are the only ones who can afford the technology and the budgets that warrant the extra cost of a 3D release – but what we need to see before 3D has even an ice-cube’s chance in hell of getting a foothold, is the arrival of some smart young filmmakers who can distance themselves from the ‘rules’ of conventional flat filmmaking and create a new language for stereoscopy that allows it to enhance the storytelling and emotion of a movie, rather than being the ‘next big special effect’. Until that day arrives, no amount of virtuosity in the mechanical/technical side of 3D is going to matter one whit, is my estimation.

Part 2 of this post will be coming up in a bit. If you think I hated the 3D, wait till you find out what I thought of the film itself…

When the maker of some web app or another doesn’t know how to make money out of a popular idea, the go-to concept is of course to somehow shoe-horn advertising into the user experience. Those of you who have a Facebook account will be familiar with the little panel of ads that runs down the side of the page – a little panel that seems to increase in length every time you log on. Personally, I think it’s completely daft way for an advertiser to spend their bucks – I must have ‘seen’ several thousand of those damn things displayed on my Facebook page and I hardly even notice them. Someone has convinced advertisers otherwise, though, or they wouldn’t be paying for them.

If I do notice one, though, it’s usually because it has an overly-high annoying factor. An offering that popped up this morning was a shining example. Ladeez and Gentlemen, I bring to you today…

The AMAZING TINNITUS MIRACLE™

Ah yes. Your flim-flam detectors just went ping, right. If they didn’t, get off my blog!

Now, I must confess that until this morning I didn’t really have a great deal of insight into tinnitus. Well, not of a scientific kind, anyway. I know what it is, of course, being a professional sound person & all, and I’ve even experienced it myself in my youth when I was much less careful of my hearing, but I’ve never known much about it physiologically. After reading the Tinnitus Miracle™ website, though, one thing of which I was entirely certain is that you need absolutely no knowledge of tinnitus to get the feeling that this site is designed to fleece easily-deceived and desperate folks of their money by convincing them that it has the absolute, failure-proof, 100% guaranteed cure for their affliction.

And, as a prospect for a scam – for a scam it surely is – it makes sense. Tinnitus is a medical condition with all the requirements that make it ripe for the pickings of those who would greedily make money from exploiting others: it’s a poorly understood, highly subjective condition with diffuse symptoms, and it can have dozens of causes. It’s distressing, persistent and can even be painful, but it’s not life-threatening. Best of all for the woo merchants, it’s a sad fact that science-based medicine doesn’t offer much in the way of relief for many sufferers of tinnitus. ((Something that people who advocate ‘alternative medicine’ seem not to understand this situation too well, and you’ll often hear it put forward as a criticism. Science-based medicine never pretends that it has all the answers, because sometimes it doesn’t. There are some things science doesn’t understand very well. That doesn’t make science faulty – it just means that a complex world is not easily understood all at once. It’s a process. And the fact that science doesn’t have an answer to a complex problem doesn’t lead logically to the proposition that ‘alternative’ medicine does. Having no solution to a problem sometimes means, quite harshly unfortunately, that we don’t have a solution to the problem. We simply don’t know everything, and there is no imperative says we should. That’s not an easy thing to tell someone who is in pain, or who has a chronic debilitating condition. Unfortunately, as much as we don’t like that reality, reality really doesn’t care what we like.))

Even though I did go on to spend a little time reading about the condition, you really don’t need a lot in the way actual knowledge to get a strong sense that the Tinnitus Miracle™ ‘phenomenon’ ((Because that’s the way it’s promoted WIDELY across the interwebs.)) is decidedly fishy.

Skimming down the MASSIVE landing page starts the alarm bells ringing fast. ((Of course, if you have severe tinnitus, maybe the noise in your head might drown out said alarm bells. Perhaps this is what the makers of the Amazing Tinnitus Miracle are counting on…)) The amazing Tinnitus Miracle™ is an eBook that you can buy for the handy dandy price of $39, and which unequivocally offers to ‘give you the secrets to eliminate virtually all types of Tinnitus within 8 weeks.’ It’s the enterprise of one Thomas Coleman, ((Coleman may or may not be a real person. For the purposes of this post, I will accept that he is, although I did discover a number of things that made me suspect that he may be a fictional concoction.)) who purports to have suffered from tinnitus for 14 years and to ‘have tried every tinnitus treatment known to science and natural health’, including, but not limited to, ‘herbal remedies, Cellfood Oxygen, tonics, habituation, detox diets, vitamin therapy, hydrotherapy, aromatherapy, macrobiotics, reflexology, Chinese Medicine, vegetarianism, the Wai diet, magnetic therapy, the mucus-less diet, the blood type diet, psychiatric treatments and whatnot.’

The outcome is that none of these (not even ‘whatnot’) were effective. Even surgery didn’t help the poor chap, nor did ‘dietary’ advice nor white noise CDs. Eventually we learn that the unflappable Mr Coleman was cured after discovering ‘a simple holistic system [that] opened the door to my new and much brighter Tinnitus free life.’ The site spares no effort to attempt to impress upon us exactly what a MIRACLE this discovery was. There’s the familiar liberal use of exclamation marks, copious underscoring, oodles of hyperbolic claims, excitable slashes of yellow highlighter and then… THE SCIENCE. Well, no, I lied. There’s no science. None. Nada. Nuttin’. What we have is that ol’ reliable science substitute though: testimonials! Everyone KNOWS a testimonial is MUCH better than science. Let me show you how it works:

♥Tetherd Cow Ahead is the best blog in the universe, bar none. I read it once and it completely cured my cancer! ~ Landon from Illinois

♥I used to have trouble keeping it up, but thanks to Tetherd Cow Ahead I can now go all night! Tetherd Cow rocks! ~ Raymundo

♥I purchased the Tetherd Cow Virtual Glass of Water and I’ve never had a computer virus since! Awesome work TCA! ~ Kofi Anan

Now brace yourselves, Acowlytes: those are not real endorsements, and they hold no credibility whatsoever! I just made them up! I know it seems shocking that someone should do such a thing, and I know you wouldn’t, dear friends, but the internet is, alas, not completely populated by good honest folks such as yourselves.

The point is of course that a fistful of internet testimonials is worth about as much as the paper they are printed on. Unfortunately there still exist out there a substantial number of people who seem to think that if something is written down in words, why, it must be true! Or something. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the endorsements could easily be as phoney as the names attached to them. ((I’ve long pondered why this should be so. I mean, I totally understand how you might buy a product that was recommended to you by a close friend. I can even stretch to understanding how you might buy a product endorsed by someone who you don’t know personally, but whose opinion you respect for some reason. But I can’t for the life of me even remotely comprehend why you would trust the opinion of some anonymous (and probably fictitious) name from woop-woop!)) What’s more, it seems that such people of limited perspicacity are unable to infer that fifty fake testimonials are no more persuasive than one. I could’ve written dozens above had I been so inclined – it’s not exactly difficult to make that shit up. ((It is vaguely possible that the testimonials are written by actual people, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they are genuine. Lots of people are willing to lend their name and photo out for a fiver. And, being extremely generous, even if the people are real, and the testimonials unsolicited, it still doesn’t mean that the information in them is necessarily accurate, nor representative of most tinnitus sufferers. Tinnitus does, in many cases, clear itself up spontaneously. If you have a few thousand people reading your book, it is quite likely that a small few will have spontaneous natural remission of the symptoms, and attribute it in some way to your magical cure. You only need a handful of those kinds of ‘miracles’ to make something look impressive…))

But it’s not until you try to find some more information about Tinnitus Miracle™ that you begin to see the real depth of this racket. Performing a Search™ on the term returns a veritable truckload of spew. Hundreds, maybe thousands of links that duck and dive through the tinnitus world, inevitably making their way back to a site selling Tinnitus Miracle™.

And not even the merest hint of proper science on a single one of them.

Searching for tinnitus+miracle+scam is an even more enlightening experience. Now we see dozens of hits in the vein of this site, returning search abstracts like ‘There is no basis for the tinnitus miracle scam’ and Is Thomas Coleman’s Tinnitus Miracle Book A Scam? My Opinion … – all couched in such a manner as to appear to be a critical appraisal of the product. If you click through, though, they all go on without exception to overwhelmingly promote Tinnitus Miracle™ in some way or another, often with direct links to the main TM™ site. There are pages of these duplicitous offerings – I clicked through a few dozen and I couldn’t find one that wasn’t some kind of endorsement of Tinnitus Miracle. ((This in itself is an intriguing indictment of the Tinnitus Miracle™ It shows clearly that the people behind it are completely aware that what they are promoting has every indicator of being a scam to those searching for tinnitus relief, and have shaped their marketing strategy accordingly. They are, in essence, predicting that they will be called on their scam, and then flooding possible criticism with noise.)) In fact, try as I might, I couldn’t find any negative critique of the Tinnitus Miracle at all. Lest you think that might be because the thing actually works, let me add that I also couldn’t find a single site that looked like it was a genuine unsolicited recommendation of the product either. To my eye, these sites all look like part of the Tinnitus Miracle empire – a vast and comprehensive attempt to stake a presence wherever anyone with tinnitus might search for some help. Now, there are two reasons I can think of that negative (or even mildly critical) reviews aren’t returned high-up in the search results. The first is that Coleman’s strategy is simply to super-saturate the SEO so that other links are just pushed way down, and you won’t easily come across adverse criticism, and the second rather more sinister one is that Mr Coleman is actively litigious and has aggressively quashed any unflattering press. ((I’d like to think this is not the case, but I guess we will see if that speculation has any substance if he finds this post.))

Another frustration I had was in attempting to find out exactly what might comprise the substance of the Tinnitus Miracle. After reading pages of mind-numbing verbiage, I was concluding that the book offering the wondrous Tinnitus Miracle was probably just a mish-mash of anything and everything that might pertain to tinnitus, with not much ‘miracle’ content at all. This site (another TM™ promotion, despite its efforts to appear to be something else), supposedly penned by one ‘Britni Dorman’ gives some support to that conclusion:

Here are some things you can learn from Tinnitus Miracle:

• Eight food items that are best for you in this condition
• Ten foods you must learn to avoid like the plague since they can worsen your condition
• The name of a powerful herb used in homeopathy that can reverse the condition quickly
• The 100% natural secret vitamin supplement that can impact your condition dramatically in just a few days
• Medications that can worsen the condition
• How you can diagnose your condition with the help of a multi-dimensional approach
• Effective breathing techniques and strategies that allows your body to begin the process of healing

Ah, right. Good foods, bad foods, vitamins, homeopathy and Evil Big Pharma drugs that you can blame. Uh-huh. And some yoga & meditation thrown in for good measure (‘cos it certainly can’t hurt, right?) As miracles go, this is looking about as impressive as producing a coin from behind a kid’s ear.

There’s lots more of the same on this site, which purports to be a tinnitus ‘treatment advice’ hub, but which is revealed by even a cursory exploration to be crammed to the gills with links to the main Tinnitus Miracle site. Perhaps the most hilarious part is the the ‘Pros & Cons’ section. Breathless raving about the pros, but the cons, well:

• Cons – When it comes to the cons, I have to admit that Tinnitus Miracle barely has any.

Mr Coleman may as well have appended his signature to that one.

I did turn up one comment on a tinnitus relief discussion group from someone who seems to know what the book entails. The main thrust of this thread is another tinnitus scam called Quietus, ((Another sure marker for scams of this kind is the appearance of other players on the field. You can bet that where there’s an opportunity to bilk vulenerable people, there’ll be more than one opportunist with his finger in the pie.)) but several sufferers ask if anyone has tried the Tinnitus Miracle. Well, someone called MissionCMD has done so, and had this to say:

I have purchased the book and read it twice. I have tried numerous things in it, but there is no ‘miracle’. There are numerous sections in the book that are duplicated (copy and paste) from one chapter to another… not to mention numerous spelling mistakes. Perhaps the ‘e-book only’ option was because the author could not get a publisher to edit? Overall, there were a few good suggestions, but there was no ‘miracle cure’ if that was what you were trying to ask. Essentailly just ways to try to manage the noise. I did a detailed search for almost three hours to try to find a reputable review before I purchased anything, and could find none. I could find many websites that had supposed reviews, however it looked much like the similar advertisement off of the original site. Suprisingly (or not) none of those sites were accepting comments anymore due to spam… hmmm. I did purchase the book anyway. You do have to keep in mind it does state ‘holestic’ in the sub-title. So the book did what it said… mentioned everything under the sun you can try to manage the tinnitus. That means recommendations ranging from therapy sessions, to extreme detoxification, to accupuncture. I personally did not find anything close to a ‘miracle’ though.

And that’s about as succinct a wrap-up as you could ever expect; the Tinnitus Miracle™ eBook appears to be nothing more than a diffuse hodge-podge of vague suggestions and both conventional and speculative treatments offered as options to address an affliction with multiple possible causes and a wide range of diverse symptoms. It seems to me, in fact, that Thomas Coleman is offering the very same solutions in his book that he says he tried in vain to cure his own tinnitus, just re-heated and served with a sprig of parsley.

A miracle, not so much.

I guess some of you are saying at this stage ‘It’s not really selling anything bogus – what’s the harm here?’

Well, this is the kind of scam that irks me for numerous reasons. First and foremost, it’s targeting vulnerable miserable people and offering them a ‘miracle’, when by any reasonable reckoning that’s not what they’re going to get when they fork out their money. ‘Eliminate Your Tinnitus Within 2 Months!’ the site declares, a promise that, as far as my reading indicates, is unlikely to be fulfilled for the majority of tinnitus sufferers. Tinnitus Miracle ‘…gives you the power to Cure Tinnitus permanently’, we hear: weasel language that deftly transfers any failure to deliver a result from the product itself to a responsibility for the sufferer to be capable of harnessing the supposed ‘power’. The site is full of such duplicity.

Another tactic that I find highly questionable is Tinnitus Miracle’s liberal us of scare tactics, another staple of scamdom:

WARNING: TINNITUS CAN BE VERY DANGEROUS IF LEFT UNTREATED

Well, no, for most sufferers that’s unlikely, despite the blood red fright caps. It is completely true that tinnitus can sometimes herald other more serious problems, but one thing is for sure – buying this book is not the way you’d want to handle that particular circumstance. As with most medical problems, if the symptoms persist, the most sensible thing you can do is to promptly see your doctor (and that information I’m providing totally free of charge).

Elsewhere:

One should only consider surgery for tinnitus if you were diagnosed with a tumor, osclerosis, or fistula . Even so the success of the surgery is 50%, with the inevitable consequence of irreversible deafness.

…which is a piece of negligent generalization bordering on criminality. The success of tinnitus surgery depends entirely on the circumstances of any individual, and the reasons for their problem. To scare all people who may be facing tinnitus surgery with the spectre of the ‘inevitable consequence of irreversible deafness’ is highly irresponsible, and demonstrates clearly that Thomas Coleman cares not one whit about your wellbeing – he just wants your $39.

My reading about tinnitus over these last few days has shown me that for an unfortunate few of those afflicted, the condition is utterly debilitating, and for the greater number it is, at the very least, distressing and uncomfortable. What these people really need to be doing is consulting knowledgable health care providers and getting the best help available. What they don’t need is a whole lot of baloney about the ‘wrong’ food and homeopathy. Even if some of what the Tinnitus Miracle book offers might be helpful (there are indications that meditation, for instance, may be of some benefit to some sufferers, depending on the cause of their tinnitus) it looks like it’s wound up with a lot of crap that’s irrelevant, of arguable efficacy or just plain hogwash.

Aside from that, the marketing campaign for Tinnitus Miracle™ is plainly full of misdirection and flimflam. As a ‘Small Sample Of What You’ll Learn When You Download Your Copy Of The Tinnitus Miracleâ„¢ System Today’, the site reels off dozens of specious claims, lame observations and tips such as these:

• Discover EVERYTHING you need to know about tinnitus, EXACTLY what causes the noise in your head. [Caps are theirs]

No-one knows EXACTLY what causes tinnitus. It can be the result of several different pathologies – physical hearing damage, biochemical interaction, neurological damage or problems, or the effects of other illness. In some cases it has a psychological component. Thomas Coleman is promising to give sufferers something that no doctor on the planet can. Why on earth should anyone believe him?

• What Personality characteristics do tinnitus sufferers share?

Oh, I dunno? The same star signs? A morbid fear of hummus? This is a stupid and irrelevant question, and is so wide in its scope that you could factor just about anything in here.

• The most powerful homeopathic herb (that can quickly reverse most tinnitus conditions) that the Tinnitus and drug industries hope you will never find out!

Of course!! The ‘drug industries’ WANT you to have tinnitus because they are EVIL. Mwahahahaha!

Please. Even the dimmest of the dim can see that this is complete rubbish. If such a ‘homeopathic herb’ even existed, only one altruistic tinnitus sufferer would need to publish its name on the net and the whole world would know. BAM! Take that Evil Big Pharma Mad Scientists. But guess what? No-one has. They obviously all feel so indebted to Thomas Coleman for revealing it to them that they don’t want to see him lose any of the money he would otherwise make on his eBook!

• The cardinal sin of every tinnitus treatment almost every tinnitus sufferer is guilty of, which instead of curing your tinnitus, weakens and destroys your body’s natural ability to defend itself, thus putting your health in serious risk and making your Tinnitus worse in the long run (and more than 92% of tinnitus sufferers are doing it!)

And you thought that masturbation just made you blind!

It’s all smoke & mirrors designed to deflect anyone from asking the question: ‘But what, exactly, am I getting for my $39?’

Which is, by all indications, nothing that’s likely to help you much, and certainly nothing that can compare to the advice that you will get from a good medical practitioner. If you have tinnitus, you have my immense sympathy. Having only experienced it as a fleeting annoyance brought on by my own carelessness, I can only imagine how awful it must be as a chronic condition. I hope that this post has helped you avoid spending money on something that would probably offer you little in the way of relief.

Yesterday saw the unprecedented simultaneous arrival in my inbox of not one but three new adventures of Simple Graphics Man.

In this first, sent to me by Atlas, SGM is really up against it. I mean really up against it. Between a rock and a hard place, it would seem. Or perhaps between a brick and a hard place. Whatever, his internal organs are certainly never going to be the same after this unfortunate altercation.

The next one, also from Atlas, apparently chronicles SGM’s employment as a ‘top man’ in the filing department of a certain government organization.

I hope he pushed from the middle! He’s not allowed to talk about that little incident, for obvious reasons. He doesn’t talk about the following little incident (sent in by Cissy Strutt) much either, for other obvious reasons.

Well, it could happen to anyone, right?

So, while we’re on the subject of Ooopsies…

This is how the City of Sydney Events page looked this morning:

This is how it looks now, after Queen Willy wrote to them to say ‘Um…’

I can’t decide which fills me with the greater delight: the fact that it was actually a mistake (because I just thought they were being clever, to be honest) or the fact that they corrected it (and thus removed all speculation about the magnitude of their cleverness). I suggest that they put ‘inaugural’ on the list for the night, and give a special prize to the person who spells it ‘inagrual’.

After all: What you lose on the swing’s you gain on the roundabout’s.

The crazy Christmas holidays can be, well, crazy, and we all know that sometimes the little details can easily get overlooked in the midst of the mad festive rush. On Boxing Day just passed, Australian retailer Myer overlooked a little detail that they undoubtedly really wish they hadn’t, since it got a lot of mirth-mileage in the Twittersphere and the Webiverse.

It seems that someone (a someone who is probably beginning their new year queuing for an unemployment cheque) inadvertently thought to add an apostrophe in the wrong place in the Myer New Year Sales’ slogan: ‘The early bird get’s the right size’.

Oh deary me.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that it’s an atrocious slogan to begin with, and the copywriter probably deserves a place in Hell for that alone, WHAT THE CRAP WERE THEY THINKING? That’s such a random apostrophe that I don’t believe anyone on the planet could be so dumb as to think ‘gets’ needs it. For fuck’s sake WHY??? It’s so bizarre in fact that I’m inclined to think that someone with evil intentions purposely sneaked it in there just to see how far along the production chain it could go before it was noticed. And travel far it did, merrily whistling its way past the ad team creative directors, the designers, the Myer client and the printers, finally declaring its cheeky presence in seven-storey high banners throughout the Myer chain. You can see an example here on the Sydney Morning Herald site.

Em. Barrass. Ing.

The best part is, though, that having printed however many hundreds or thousands of posters and banners with the cringeworthy blunder, Myer were obliged to rectify it or look like even greater dunderheads. The signs now look like this:

Management obviously felt that the mistake didn’t warrant the expense of reprinting, so the band-aid solution was almost literally that – a black swatch of tape on every instance of the pesky punctuation point.

This leads to the almost greater crime of an ungainly kerned word in the slogan. In other words, an offence of grammar is being repealed at the expense of a crime against typography. The signs are still up everywhere and every time I see one it makes me chuckle with schadenfreude.

I was in Myer a few days ago, attempting to exchange a box of drinking glasses which had one piece missing. As I was standing at the counter, waiting to be served, the saleswoman – who was plainly aware of my presence – just wandered away somewhere without so much as a word of explanation and didn’t come back. I waited for five minutes. Another customer queued behind me.

‘Is anyone serving you?’ she asked.

‘Well, there was someone,’ I said, ‘but she disappeared somewhere over there.’

We waited for another few minutes. Finally, the woman dumped her goods on the counter.

‘And they wonder why we shop online,’ she said, leaving.

Right on sister.

I hung around for a bit longer but eventually thought, fuck it, I’ll just go get another box myself. I took the old box out of my bag and put a new, complete box in, and headed off. A security guard was not ten feet away.

The moral to this story is:

Little stroke’s fell great oak’s.

Just suppose, dear friends, that someone gave you (for your birthday, perhaps) a quality bottle of wine, but of a rather current vintage. You would probably know that the wise thing to do is to lay it aside for a couple of years in which time its component parts would do that magical aging thing that wine components do, and, upon opening it in 2020, say, ((Should the world not have ended in 2012, needless to say…)) you would have a tipple that was superior to that same wine opened today.

If, however, you are a mildly impatient person like myself, the temptation to open that bottle in confluence with some other circumstance (such as running out of other available bottles, for example) might cause you to reach for the corkscrew somewhat prematurely, depriving you of the optimal wine experience.

Well, Faithful Acowlytes, at last that dilemma is solved forever! I herewith present to you, the Vintage Express Wine & Liquor Aging Accelerator.

The VEWLAA takes your infant brew and, using ‘powerful Neodymium magnets’ ages your drink 10 years in 10 seconds. No, no, seriously, it does! With magnets. Look, here’s the science behind it:

I must admit I was quite skeptical, but this product is amazing. You can take a mid-range bottle of wine and in a few minutes, spectacular bottle of wine!

~Trina from Florida.

We used the wine ager on Christmas Eve on some delicious NYS Finger Lakes Red. We did not do an official before and after taste test but the wine seemed to taste richer and smoother on the palate.

~Reb395.

How does it work? Not sure. Do I believe the explanation? Not really. All I know is that the accelerator really changes things somehow, and makes wine/whiskey taste much more smooth and mellow.

~Ethan.

Well, OK, not science, but testimonials, and that’s exactly the same thing, right?

I’m a Believer says:

We haven’t try with just a glass but with the entire bottle let it age overnight in the accelerator

Overnight! Crikey, that must have aged the damn stuff some several centuries. How great would that taste, eh? KnuckleheadBBQ ((A fitting nom-de-plume if ever there was one.)) from Montana and his wife have even gone so far as:

… routinely leaving a bottle of wine in it for several days before opening it…

Man – that would have to be like drinking something fermented in the Mesozoic! ((Of course, the more astute among you will have grokked the exponential scale implied by the writing on the gadget: 10 seconds for 10 years, 3 minutes for 20 years. You can work it out if you can be bothered, but basically the ramification is that the improvement scale is self-limiting. After a relatively small number of hours, the effect of further time in the prongs is negligible. Even if the damn thing did work, leaving your wine in it for several days is to all intents and purposes pointless.))

Ah yes, it is yet another wine scam, this time one that invokes that age-old pseudoscientific notion that magnets confer beneficial properties on anything that comes within their field of influence. In this case, the powerful neodymium magnets, through some completely unspecified action have the fortunate effect of making wine taste better. ((And, in the case of the Wine Enhancer, also eliminating ‘those horrible wine headaches’.))

OK, well, all the above came from Skymall (which sells the ‘accelerator’), via a link thoughtfully provided to me by acce245. But a little detective work turns up the people responsible for the VEWLAA. And w00t! They have a science page. Oh how I LOVE a science page. Let’s find out how the VEWLAA really works:

The earth’s magnetic field helps create the great taste of fresh fruits. During the long growing season, fruit is held in a relatively constant position in relation to the earth’s magnetic field, aligning the liquid particles much like tiny compass needles. This natural balance gives fresh picked fruit its smooth, natural flavor.

The delicate magnetic alignment of the liquid particles is destroyed during the crushing, straining, pasteurizing, fermenting and distilling used to manufacture beverages, and much of the smooth natural taste is lost. The traditional slow aging process of wine and distilled spirits allows the particles to once again become aligned by the earth’s magnetic field, but this process takes years, and dramatically increases the cost of the finished product.

Oh, how much does my stomach hurt from the laughing? Of course, once you had your polarities are re-aligned, you’d want to be mighty careful about swirling your glass, right? ‘Cos then you might ruffle its molecules’ nap. I don’t think neodymium magnets would fix that.

But hey – the VEWLAA is supposed to work on other beverages too. Why, Ethan, above, proclaims:

We tested juice, coffee, red bull/vodka. Someone even was convinced that crystallized ginger was more potent after being aged.

Are you following this Acowlytes? 10+ year-old coffee, juice, Red Bull and crystallized ginger are superior to their fresh equivalents! My own personal experience tells me that four-day-old coffee tastes disgusting, let alone coffee that’s been standing for 10 years, so I think you could consider me a little skeptical of these claims.

My favourite part of the Vintage Express site, though, is their own testimonials page. It features glowing reports from ‘Jeff’ a ‘wine & spirits appreciator’ and a ‘female taste tester’. Wow, am I SOLD!

Oh, and there’s also sommelier Michael Hanke from Morton’s Restaurant, Seattle, who has probably destroyed his credibility beyond all hope of salvation by appearing in a video endorsing the VEWLAA. After watching it, I’m inclined to conclude that the reporter who declares ‘I don’t know much about wines’ at the beginning of the story is more of an expert than the expert.

So, is there any real science behind the idea that magnets can age wine? The answer is no. But does this does stop a proliferation of devices like the VEWLAA? The answer is also, quite unsurprisingly I think you will agree, no.

There is:

•The Wine Clip (‘Using magnets to treat fluids – water, fuel, wine, etc. – is not a new idea.’ No, but it’s a frikkin’ stupid one.)

•The Wine Cellar Express (‘We can’t explain it ourselves… will the wonders of science never cease to amaze us!’

•The Wine Enhancer (You really have to visit this site)

•The Perfect Sommelier (‘How it works is a mystery!’)

Dozens of sites, claims that overthrow the laws of physics, hyperbole that makes PT Barnum look modest, veritable rivers of gushing subjectivity and not one single, spare, scrap of science. It is to make one want to bash one’s head on the table in sheer despair. Is there no skepticism of these stupid gadgets? Well, it turns out that not all wine drinkers are quite as brainless as the ones providing testimonials for the abovementioned devices. One sensible wine site that I found – The Winelover’s Page – had this to say about the Catania Wine Enhancer:

After an extended E-mail correspondence, Mr. Catania talked me into trying a Wine Enhancer for myself. I duly set up a double-blind tasting for a group of local sommeliers, comparing treated and untreated glasses of wines in unmarked glasses, revealing the identity of the treated glass only after the scores were in. I tried it again with other groups, and at home, repeatedly, always tasting “blind.” The results were never better (or worse) than random, suggesting that the device has no effect on wine at all.

…

Similar tests by myself and others with the other products [Some of these are mentioned above – Rev.], including a rather hilarious “offline” session in NYC with a group of our forum members and the inventor of the Wine Cellar Express, showed consistently similar results: Zero, zip, nothing, nada.

At last, the voice of reason. As always, when the science is correctly applied, the truth will out.

And that’s something to which you can reliably raise a glass. Slàinte!