Tetherd Cow Ahead

On tonight’s tv news in relation to discussions with concerned residents over untended bushland in Canberra:

If anything caught alight in there it would spread like wildfire!

Yes it would lady. Exactly like wildfire.

At least it wasn’t ‘it was like a bomb going off’.

The BBC reports that:

A group of rabbis and Jewish mystics have taken to the skies over Israel, praying and blowing ceremonial trumpets to ward off swine flu.

OK. Someone remind me again which century we’re living in. Oh that’s right! The one after the one when they invented powered flight.

The article goes on to say:

The flu is often referred to as H1N1 in Israel, where pigs are seen as unclean.

Well duh! If the little porkers had washed their hands after visiting the piggy bathroom they wouldn’t have gotten the flu in the first place.

___________________________________________________________________________

Thanks to Kirke for bringing it to the attention of The Cow

___________________________________________________________________________

Along with the prestigious Cow Medals I hand out very sparingly here on The Cow, I think I’m going to have to invent some kind of trophy for the opposite end of the spectrum; an award for those who say the stupidest things on teh webs.

I’d kick off the ceremony with the CEO of Sony, Michael Lynton, who last week opined “I haven’t seen any good come out of the internet”. Translating that into something that makes sense to people who aren’t the buck-stops-here-guy for multinational companies: “I don’t get why this thing is bigger than television and getting bigger by the attosecond and we can’t figure out a way to make as much money out of it as we used to make out of all that old technology we have”.[tippy title=”*”]Or: “God in Heaven – just look at all that MONEY that we’re NOT making!”[/tippy]

Mr Lynton got a good old walloping immediately on the nets of course, and tried to backpedal in an article on the Huffington Post, managing only to dig himself an even deeper hole by revealing the real extent of his failure to grok the magnitude of the thing he’s trying to get his brain around.

I cannot subscribe to the views of those online critics who insist that I “just don’t get it,”

…he protests, and then goes on to comprehensively demonstrate his inability to get it.

His Huffington Post whinge is so clubfooted, and so embarrassingly naive, that it is staggering to believe that this guy has managed to get to be the guy in charge of one of the largest corporations in the world.

He laughingly attempts to equate the ‘Information Superhighway'[tippy title=”†”]Surely one of the daftest most empty-headed and inappropriate expressions ever uttered…[/tippy] with an actual ‘highway’…

In the 1950’s, the Eisenhower Administration undertook one of the most massive infrastructure projects in our nation’s history — the creation of the Interstate Highway System… Guard rails went along dangerous sections of the road. Speed and weight limits saved lives and maintenance costs. And officers of the law made sure that these rules were obeyed.

…and then suggests that unless we do something, our kids are going to grow up inside some kind of artistic vacuum, without anything at all decent to ‘enliven their culture’.

As I go into my sixth decade, I listen to people like Mr Lynton and realise that… I actually feel young again. While he stamps his foot and pouts and sulkingly packs up his marbles into his little string bag, folks all around the planet who do understand what’s going on in the 21st Century are just getting on with their business and doing very well thanks all the same.

Mr Lynton wants the world to be the way it was when his company was making packets of money and everything was nicely settled into a paradigm he could understand. By drawing stupid analogies and playing the Fear card he wants people to think the world will be a whole lot worse off without companies like Sony providing the entertainment they think we should see. The implication being, of course, that without them the alternatives couldn’t possibly be anything but inferior, and we would all be engulfed by some kind of cultural Dark Ages.

I’m getting to be an old guy now (relatively speaking, you understand), but never have I been as optimistic as I am now about the future of art. Would I be disappointed if mega budget movies like The Da Vinci Code and Spiderman disappeared off the face of the earth? Not one whit. Would I care if Mariah Carey or Avril Lavigne or Kings of Leon were taken up in the Rapture tomorrow? Not even remotely.

My Lynton – for all your wailings about the End Times, let me put this to you: an artist doesn’t need much these days to make something worth watching or listening to. And an audience doesn’t need much to experience that effort. To translate: We. Don’t. Need.You.

If you didn’t exist, music and painting and poetry and literature and film wouldn’t cease to exist. As much as you desperately might like to think you have some important part to play in the great cultural sweep of the human species, you are just an accessory. You are unimportant.

Do you get it?

No, I didn’t think so.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Or: “God in Heaven – just look at all that MONEY that we’re NOT making!”

†Surely one of the daftest most empty-headed and inappropriate expressions ever uttered…

___________________________________________________________________________

I’ve long been fascinated with the concept of the ‘village idiot’, a notion that is so entrenched in our collective psyches that pretty much everybody knows exactly what it means. The concept of the village idiot appears everywhere from Monty Python sketches, to the name of a motorcycle club, to the almost ubiquitous association of the term with George W. Bush in recent times.

I’ll bet that you, like me, thought it was an idea that has somehow made its way to us from medieval times, to take its place in the zeitgeist as a quaint reminder of days of yore, where every village had its idiot and a nicely aimed rotten turnip was not only completely politically correct, but de rigeur.

Turns out that teh internets don’t have much to say on the history of the village idiot at all. The root[tippy title=”*”]Geddit? Root? Turnip?[/tippy] of the idea is somewhat obscure, and the oldest actual reference to it that can be tracked down comes from the preface to George Bernard Shaw’s acerbic Major Barbara, written in 1907.

Before that, nothing. It’s quite surprising really – I was expecting it to be a term rich with history and colour, maybe something featuring in Shakespeare or Chaucer, but it appears that its main activity has been in the near past; the invention of an era almost without villages as such.[tippy title=”†”]Not, however, an era without idiots, needless to say.[/tippy]

So, as we go forward into this age of the Global Village, we will, of course, need to refresh this term. As idiots embrace technology there will undoubtedly be a role for them to fill, and the very least we can do, is offer them the opportunity to do so!

___________________________________________________________________________

*Geddit? Root? Turnip?

†Not, however, an era without idiots, needless to say.

(Photo of the Technological Idiot swiped from the inimitable Dark Roasted Blend)

___________________________________________________________________________

Swine Flu is sweeping the globe,* so with the plague upon us, all the Christian wack-jobs are elbowing furiously for positions at the front of the queue for the End Times Spectacular. The folks at Rapture Ready are no exception. If you’ve never visited Rapture Ready, you should. I’ve trawled around it several times and it’s so completely unhinged that I’m still not entirely convinced that it’s not a giant leg pull.

Aside from interminable lists of things that presage The End (including Swine Flu of course)†, there are answers to questions such as What happens to members of non-Christian faiths in the event of the Rapture? (kiss your ass goodbye, Heathen), Is it okay for a man to dress like a woman? (what do you think, pervert?) and Do we all get the same rewards in Heaven? (of course not you sucker).

There’s also the Who will you spend Eternity with? comparison test. Predictably enough, Satan is not recommended. But quite disturbingly, if you decide (after reading about ‘pain so great you’ll be gnashing your teeth for all eternity’), that you don’t want to spend forever with Old Nick, and you click on the link at the bottom of all the dire warnings To see what the requirements are for following Jesus, you get catapaulted into Rapture Ready limbo with an ‘Oh great, now you’ve done it. You’re complete lost’ (sic) error.

Rather offputting if you’ve just seen the error of your ways and opted for a speedy conversion before the rain of frogs starts. I like to think that there’s way more truth in it, though, than the Rapture Ready site creators ever intended…

___________________________________________________________________________

*Hyperbole for effect. Why should the newspapers have a monopoly on sensationalism?

†Well that’s a sure bet – if they just keep on shovelling enough crap in there, inevitably there will come a time where they can say ‘See? We told you so!’

___________________________________________________________________________