Tetherd Cow Ahead

The art world has never really been known for being sensible, but there is a feud going on at the moment in England that must surely rank as one of the most petty and unfathomable squabbles since my school days when Charlie Peerbohm poured green paint on Debbie McMahon’s fingerpainting in first grade. Synopsizing: last year, a 17 year old street artist named Cartrain made a number of satirical collage portraits of the much more famous artist Damien Hirst using copies of some of Hirst’s own images. Hirst took exception to this for reasons unknown and, using his considerable fortune, pulled legal muscle on Cartrain to force him to hand over the portraits (so that they might be disposed of) along with £195 in compensation (the amount of money that Cartrain allegedly made from selling them).

Considering that Damien Hirst is one of the most commercially successful plunderers of popular culture of all time, this seems churlish at best, and downright petulant otherwise.

I’ve never been a great fan of Hirst’s creations. In my view he’s just fine art’s version of a shock jock; he creates things that are supposed to put people’s noses out of joint under the pretense of making insightful or droll commentary. I could never quite put my finger on why his efforts annoyed me so much until one day, after getting brain freeze from a slushy whilst watching the sharks at Sydney Aquarium, it came to me: Damien Hirst’s art has no sense of humour. It is po-faced pretension of the most vacuous kind. And I think Hirst quite possibly believes that he really is saying something profound. This latest episode has pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

Cartrain, on the other hand, is my kinda guy. He does have a sense of humour and he makes interesting and provocative social commentary. He’s not an artistic genius, perhaps, and owes more than a little to Banksy, but heck, he’s a teenager after all – he’s got plenty of years ahead of him to develop. The portrait of Mr Hirst that you see reproduced above, is one by Cartrain that has escaped the iron clutch of Hirst’s moneyed henchmen and, via the blog of art commentator Jonathan Jones, found its way to teh internets. ((As anyone with an ounce of insight would have realised was quite inevitable given the circumstances. Hirst’s attempt to quash dissemination of the portraits looks all the more silly for his failure to understand their ultimate cultural context.)) Its sarcastic caricature of Hirst is surely well within the purview of artistic witticism. I believe the confiscated portraits are in the same vein.

But the thing that has really enamored me of Cartrain is the revenge that he he has wrought upon Hirst. In July this year, Cartrain visited the Tate Britain and stole a box of pencils from Hirst’s intellectually vapid installation Pharmacy which is on display there. He then created a mock ransom note demanding return of his portraits in exchange for the pencils. The note stated that failure to comply would result in the pencils being ‘sharpened’. Most anyone would consider that fairly amusing – this is not the mindset of a vicious person – but not Hirst, apparently. As one of the wealthiest artists of all time he looks sulky and pathetic as he stands on his assertion that his intellectual property rights have been violated.

And now, in what must be one of the most egregious over-reactions of the decade, the situation has escalated to the point where the police have arrested Cartrain over the stunt, and he has been charged with £10,000,000.00 for ‘damages’ and a further £500,000.00 for theft. ((Cartrain’s father was also arrested, on suspicion of ‘harbouring’ the pencils.)) Translating into American money, that’s over $17 million dollars worth of charges for a box of pencils. ((And I bet the security guard who was on duty that day would have been a lot more attentive if he’d realised he was guarding pencils with that kind of pedigree…))

This whole debacle reminds me of nothing so much as the Metallica/Napster affair in 2000, and Lars Ulrich’s indignant posturing over the ‘damage’ that file sharing was doing to the band’s sales. The outcome of that particular episode was that Ulrich came out looking like an ass and nothing changed except for Napster getting shafted. Metallica certainly isn’t hanging out at the soup kitchen as a result. Similarly, it’s difficult to comprehend Hirst’s disproportionately vehement reaction to Cartrain’s satirical jibe. What the hell does he care? It’s not like he’s going broke anytime soon.

Maybe it’s simply that Cartrain’s portraits are just a little bit too incisive, and the emperor doesn’t like everyone seeing right through his clothes to his cubic zirconia-encrusted skeleton…

Because we’ve ventured back onto the topic of Bonox, it occurred to me that many of you across the various ponds may be interested in the most recent news from Bonox’s creators, Kraft, who I’m sure you will know better for their much more famous product Vegemite (we’ve discussed it before here).

Vegemite has been around in Australia since 1922, and has remained virtually unchanged. A year or so back, though, Kraft did a survey on their website to find out what Australians ‘wanted’ in their Vegemite, quite obviously with an eye to boosting the sales of their atramentous spread. This notion that you can somehow ‘improve’ an already perfectly acceptable product, is, it has to be said, a quintessentially American one. Australians don’t tend to think like that.[tippy title=”†”]Well, Australians who don’t subscribe to nutty ever-accelerating economic models, anyway.[/tippy] So it will come as no surprise to you at all to know that Vegemite is now 100% American-owned. Like most of the rest of Australia. But I digress. Vegemite occupies that most privileged of positions on the supermarket shelf, alongside strawberry jam and peanut butter; it is what it is, and trying to make it into something else ‘more successful’ is really only the kind of fluffy dream that fills the restless sleep of advertising people.[tippy title=”‡”]Yeah, I know what you’re going to say – peanut butter comes in crunchy and smooth, but I really don’t want to contemplate a crunchy Vegemite.[/tippy]

Anyhoo, Kraft got all kinds of suggestions about how Vegemite could be improved – there was a website you could visit and put in your threepence-worth about how you’d like to see it combined with muesli or salmon paste or whatnot. There were a lot of rather nauseating suggestions and I speculate that Kraft neglected to understand that they were not really seeing a proper representation of the Vegemite-buying public, but rather a whole bunch of people who evidently thought it had some kind of defect (although there were some like me who visited the site and left comments to the effect that they should simply leave it alone). As it turns out this led, eventually, to the announcement of a wonderful new product which has been sitting on supermarket shelves for the past few months sporting the moniker ‘Name Me’. Yes, that’s right, in a transparently sad grab for publicity, the people who run Kraft’s advertising campaign have attempted to rope in the hoardes of loyal Happy Little Vegemites to come up with a name for the new stuff.

This is not the first time that Kraft have tried to spin Vegemite off into something else. You’d have thought they’d have learnt their lesson about fiddling with an iconic cultural lynchpin after their merger of Vegemite and cheese in the 1990s failed to gain traction in the world of toast-topping comestibles.

But no. Now they’re doing pretty much the same thing again – this time it’s Vegemite and cream cheese. And, my prediction is that it will follow the same ignominious trajectory of the 1990s effort, particularly in light of what I’m now about to tell you.

You will have noticed that I haven’t linked to anything Vegemite so far in this post. And it’s not going to happen. Because, when I was doing a bit of legwork for y’all to read about the grand Vegemite saga, I came across this incredible disclaimer on the Vegemite website:

All other use, copying or reproduction of any part of this Site is prohibited (save to the extent permitted by law). Without limiting the foregoing, no part of this Site may be reproduced on any other internet site, and you are not authorised to redistribute or sell the material or reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise convert it to any other form that people can use. You are also prohibited from linking the Site to another website in any way whatsoever (emphasis mine).

Putting it succinctly, Kraft expressly forbids you to link to the ‘new Vegemite’ site!

There are few things quite so sad as business people who just completely fail to grok the zeitgeist. I can’t say whether it’s Kraft or their advertising agency who has prompted the instigation of Vegemite v.2 and this harebrained web campaign, but I know where I’d put my money. Mr Kraft, if you’re reading this, sack those goobers. NO-ONE in this early part of the 21st century makes a website that you are not allowed to link to and protects it with a legal rider! That’s the internet equivalent of building your retail outlet in Upper Siberia and then posting security guards with tasers at the front door just in case anyone does find you.

I can only surmise that Kraft is so nervous about their new product that they really don’t want to attract attention to it. Either that or they have arrived at the quite unbalanced conviction that someone might want to steal the idea. Really, I can’t think of one single sensible explanation for why you’d want to prevent people from wording up your spread. Or spreading your word.

I haven’t tried the new ‘Vegemite’ and I had no real intention of doing so. I like Vegemite just as it is, and I miss it if I can’t get it (like when I visit… well… anywhere…). But as you know I will pull out all the stops in the service of science, so I make a pledge to you Acowlytes – this weekend I will throw off my cultural preconceptions and try the new ‘Name Me’. This will allow me to post an appropriate food review to coincide with Kraft’s Grand Reveal of the new name on September 21.

I’d link you to where you can find out all about that, but hey – my hands are tied.

ADDENDUM: It’s been pointed out that the legal rider on the Vegemite site is probably intended to stop users in the Vegemite ‘community’ from posting links from inside the forums to other places. If this indeed the case, for a legal document it’s sloppily ambiguous (viz: ‘in any way whatsoever’), still dopey and in all likelihood just as unenforceable. And it’s madness that you are compelled to agree (via an irksome and irritatingly flakey Flash crawler) to a set of legal requirements before you can even read the ‘No Name’ site – something pretty much unparalleled on any commercial site I’ve ever visited, and again vividly demonstrating Kraft’s lack of web acumen.

ADDENDUM #2: The Flash User Agreement has now vanished from the Vegemite site. Obviously its ridiculous nature has been pointed out to someone. The site still retains all the conditions in its Terms of Use though, so nothing has really changed, other than that you’re not forced to agree to them before you can view anything.

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†Well, Australians who don’t subscribe to nutty ever-accelerating economic models, anyway.

‡Yeah, I know what you’re going to say – peanut butter comes in crunchy and smooth, but I really don’t want to contemplate a crunchy Vegemite.

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Acowlytes! I have some amazing news to bring you!

According to American astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, a white dwarf star in the constellation of Centaurus, next to the Southern Cross, has been found to contain a 3000-kilometre-wide toilet into which you can throw all your money!

Well, that’s not exactly the way they put it on a site I just found called Space Diamond – I’ve just fixed it so it’s closer to the truth.

What the people at Space Diamond actually want you to believe is that the white dwarf in Centaurus contains a GIANT DIAMOND[tippy title=”*”]It actually might, believe it or not. But that’s entirely beside the point.[/tippy] and if you send them some money for a ‘Space Diamond Gift Certificate’, you will be entitled to… well… to a gift certificate. That’s right Cowpokes, these people are selling NOTHING. OK, to be accurate, the certificate promises that it is ‘good’ for ‘the first carets harvest from space’. Hahahaha! The first carets harvested from a white dwarf star that is in a constellation five light years away from our own solar system! By my calculation, even if they sent up a spaceship with accredited jewellers right now, we’d all be well and truly dead before they got back.

With this in mind, I wrote to the smiling lady at Space Diamond’s ‘Customer Service’ department. I think I’ll call her Wanda. This is a picture of her:

Dear Space Diamond,

When do you anticipate the first diamond harvest will occur? Your offer seems almost too good to be true, and I don’t want to waste my money on something that is not scientifically feasible.

Yours sincerely

Reverend Anaglyph

I expect to hear from Wanda promptly with a detailed description of Space Diamond’s near light-speed propulsion system and their strategy for the penetration of the core of a massively dense star and the excavation thereof. I’m also curious to peruse their proposal for how they plan to get several trillion tons of diamond back here, and why doing so wouldn’t immediately cause diamonds to become as worthless as gravel.

Stay tuned.

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*It actually might, believe it or not. But that’s entirely beside the point.

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Seeing red? Feeling blue? Got aches and pains that just won’t go away? Tried whisky and aspirin and bonox and nothing seems to work anymore? Why not shed some light on the problem: the iPhone Pocket Pain Doctor is here!

Yes, dear Acowlytes, no matter what your problem, it can be solved by an iPhone app. And if your problem is a kinda sorta non-specific-type general one, then the right kind of app will obviously feature as its main operating principle – all together now – woowoo!!!

(The YouTube video has been removed for some reason. You have to imagine a long spiel from an unappealingly pushy man who shows you how you can make the iPhone shine coloured light on your skin. It’s far from persuasive).

That’s right Cowmrades – just by shining red or blue light on yourself using your phone, Pocket Pain Doctor will relieve all kinds of pain, make you more alert and cure your acne! Or, on the other hand, it might not. The bottom of the Pocket Pain Doctor site features this disclaimer:

BluWave and RedWave are not intended to treat or cure any disease. None of the statements on this website have been evaluated by the FDA.

(The Pocket Pain Doctor site has now been pulled, sadly. But unsurprisingly).

See, that’s the REALLY GREAT THING about woowoo! You can have your cake and eat it too! Your product may or may not work but people still pay you money for it. Marvellous!

Oh. But what’s this? There’s some references to ‘Clinical Studies‘ on the site! Hooray! This is bound to be enlightening… let’s see what we have. First a link to PubMed. OK, that’s impressive. It’s a draft of a paper (supposedly) called Seasonal Disorder & Body Effects Of Blue Light. ((It’s actually called “Action spectrum for melatonin regulation in humans: evidence for a novel circadian photoreceptor.” Do these people think that potential Pocket Pain Doctor customers are stupid? Oh.)) Hey waiddaminute! That’s got nothing to do with ‘Seasonal Disorder’ or blue light! It’s about the effect of light on melatonin suppression. OK – here’s another one from Modern Medicine: Blue Light Kills Acne Bacteria. Wow… so it appears. That is, if it’s catalyzing a chemical called 5-aminolevulinic acid! I wonder if the iPhone squirts some of that out too?

How about red light then? Here’s a link to a NASA article: Red Light Therapy Relieves Pain Naturally. Oh looky! It’s actually about how infrared light helps cell regrowth in a certain type of cancer, minimising the pain as a result. What about Red Light Relieves Arthritis Pain & Muscle Injuries? Well, that’s a link ((On a site called Healing Light Seminars – now that really looks reputable.)) to a pdf that appears to be a list of double blind clinical trials – but not including the findings of those trials! And anyway, they are trials of an entirely unrelated kind – various methods of infrared laser treatment. Just in case anyone isn’t clear on this – your iPhone does not emit infrared laser light. I’m astonished that anyone can get away with this kind of complete fakery.

In a comment on the home page of the Pocket Pain Doctor site, the person who created the app complains that over on Engadget they gave his toy a bit of an unfair bashing. From his tone, one might even come to the conclusion that this guy believes in what he’s pushing. But that’s a little hard to accept when you see the duplicity involved in those links to ‘scientific evidence’ that he has provided. At best he misunderstands what he’s reading and actually thinks his sources offer some kind of substantiation of his idea. At worst, his ‘corroboration’ is deceitful.

In any case, it’s all about to become academic. Down in the Tetherd Cow Ahead labs, the boffins have been hard at work on this very concept, and I’m sure it will not surprise you at all to hear that they have perfected a new technology which we call ChromaCow™. Incorporating the technology behind the TCA Virtual Glass of Water™, ChromaCow™ offers you everything that you get with Pocket Pain Doctor, only IT’S ABSOLUTELY FREE! Best of all, TCA Labs is introducing a third, even better alternative to RedWave™ and BluWave™ – YelloWave™! With TCA YelloWave™ active on your computer, we UNRESERVEDLY GUARANTEE ((Guarantee may not be guaranteed.)) that the true nature of your innermost self will be revealed to you!!! Simply click on the icons below for the complete ChromaCow™ experience! (Make sure you do them all in order or your spectral chakras may become misaligned, resulting in mood swings, sour milk or even anal haunting).

So off you go Faithful Cowpokes – tell all your friends that they need no longer waste their money on woowoo in the iPhone app shop when they can get it here at Tetherd Cow Ahead FOR NOTHING!

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(Thanks once more to Atlas for putting me on the trail. I suppose that now I really am going to have to give him a prize for the Pickled Herring Poetry Contest.)

Now, as I mentioned at the end of that last post, before I got distracted by the whole V debacle I had set out to jot down a few thoughts on something a little more serious. A related topic, to be sure, but seriouser. And much more deeper. You’ll understand the detour I think – just keep in the back of your mind that it might involve lizards and you should keep up.

In a recent issue of New Scientist magazine, Dr Susan Blackmore (a scientist we quite like because she dyes her hair rainbow colours) made some interesting speculations about what she calls the ‘third replicator’ of our species. I’m not going to go into detail about her article (you can read it here if you like) but to precis, her idea is that there have been two important shapers of human evolution on this planet – genes and memes – and that we may now be looking at the emergence of a third replicator which will change us beyond what we can ever anticipate and probably do so even before we are likely to be fully aware of it. This third replicator (for which she invites us to invent a name) is something, she speculates, that is arising already out of our rather recently acquired human interconnectedness. I like the notion and I even think she may well be onto something, but that’s by-the-by; let’s push on a bit.

Toward the end of her item she brings up the subject of the perennial modern human quest to find life elsewhere in the universe. It is a pursuit close to my heart – I, too, would love to know if there is life out there. Really, who wouldn’t? Like about a zillion other people, I was happy to jump on the SETI@Home bandwagon when that started up, and for a while there I was pretty damn eager to help find the next Wow! signal. But then I started to reflect… The idea of making actual contact with aliens has always freaked me out a bit. While it would be nice to know if those lizard people are out there I’m not so sure I like the idea that they may consequently know we’re out here. Just think about it for a second: any civilization with whom we might make contact must necessarily be at least as technologically advanced as we are, and, more likely, somewhat further advanced. Can a situation like this turn out to be to our advantage? Given the only example to which we can refer – the history of the civilization of own planet – I think we can make an almost unassailable rule-of-thumb. I will call it the Reverend’s Law of Beads & Mirrors:

• If, by fate or design, two previously separated cultures are drawn together, the one with the least sophisticated technology always ends up with the worst part of the bargain.

I don’t think I can think of a single exception to this Law in the entire span of human history (although I would be completely delighted to be pointed to any counter-examples).

Further, I propose that this Law is exponential – the greater the difference between the two technological entities, the worse the outcome for the less sophisticated one. Again, my examination of human transactions shows no contradiction to this addendum.

And so I ask: is it really such a good idea to buddy up with the lizard-folk? Won’t it just turn out badly for us? Call me xenophobic, but if an alien is offering his claw in friendship, I’m keeping my brain way out of reach of his telescoping mandibles.

“But Reverend,” I hear you exclaim, “If Professor Einstein was correct, even if the lizard people are super-intelligent, then the laws of physics won’t allow them to ever get here! So our hamsters are completely safe!”

Ah yes, but this is where we turn back to Dr Blackmore’s hypothesis, and the scary implication she has entirely missed (or perhaps glossed over, if she is, as I am beginning to suspect, a lizard person herself…)

After making a case for our human originated Replicator 3 (R3) somehow acquiring a gestalt ‘imprint’ of the sum of human experience that none of us individually may even fully comprehend, she says in her New Scientist article:

Perhaps intelligence and civilisation are not what we should be concentrating on […in our search to find extraterrestrial life…]. My analysis based on Universal Darwinism suggests that instead we should be looking for R3 planets

Hey! Whoa there Starbuck! Throttle back on the thrusters and pull up planet-side for a bit!

Can you see the full implication of what she’s proposing, Acowlytes? Not that we should be looking for life on other worlds, but that we should be looking for third level replicators on other worlds. Or, to fill in the step that she seemed to have… missed… (yeah, right, Ms Lizard Scientist): that we should be setting ourselves up so that our third replicators (you remember – they’re the ones over which we may not have any actual control) can get in touch with their third replicators. In other words – our souped-up way-brainier-than-a-hundred-Einsteins Hive Mind confabbing (behind our backs) with their souped-up way-brainier-than-a-million-reptilian-Einsteins Hive Mind…

The lizards are probably in parking orbit already.

Well, alrighty then! I’ve sure got a name for this R3 thingy: let’s call it a neme, after the word nemesis – something it will surely become. From the Greek nemein for ‘retribution’, personified as the goddess of divine punishment.

I’ve got a b-a-a-a-d feeling about this…

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Oh, and while we’re on the subject – I see from the poll that we now have two lizard people among the Cownoscenti! Praise Mangar-kunjer-kunja! I pray that he sends you a plentiful supply of flies and hamsters!

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Spare me once more from the morons.

I’ve spoken before about senator Stephen Conroy[tippy title=”*”]Just testing to make sure you paid attention to the last post.[/tippy], the politician who somehow[tippy title=”†”]One can only speculate that he won the position on the hoop-la or the chocolate wheel.[/tippy] has ended up being Australia’s advisor on all things internet, and today the Cow’s attention turns toward him once more. This time, it’s because he has decided to offer up his advice on internet security.[tippy title=”‡”]After an ignominious (yet predictably sanctimonious) backdown on the imbecilic ‘Clean Feed’ proposal.[/tippy] And Spagmonster knows that a guy with his level of 1337 k3wl is going to have some pretty U$3PhUL words to say on the matter. Am I right?

Yes, Senator Conroy, wearing his white hat out in public for all the world to see, yesterday launched Australia’s National Change Your Password Day.

“No one wants to lose their bank details to criminals or fall victim to an online scam and that’s why it’s important that people understand simple steps, such as getting a better, stronger password, can help them stay smart online and protect their personal information.”

Password? Password? Are you reading what I’m reading here? Stephen Conroy seems to be under the impression that people use only ONE PASSWORD!

Further demonstrating his uncanny 1337 (r3D3|\|714L$, Conroy goes on to recommend that:

…passwords always include letters and numbers and warned people to be vigilant. “Stop and think before you click on links or attachments.”

Jesus H. Christ. You’d think this guy has only just discovered the internet. What really worries me is that maybe that’s true.

Australians, answer me this: of all the people we could have had appointed to look after the most exciting and powerful concept to come the way of human civilization since the invention of language, why have we been saddled with a cretin? Not just someone who isn’t quite up to date with the latest and the neatest (that would be understandable) but someone who hasn’t got the faintest clue what he’s talking about. Worse, he hasn’t got the faintest clue, but he doesn’t know how to sound like he does!

Excuse me. I have to go change my password.

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†One can only speculate that he won the position on the hoop-la or the chocolate wheel.

‡After an ignominious (yet predictably sanctimonious) backdown on the imbecilic ‘Clean Feed’ proposal.

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