Tetherd Cow Ahead

UPDATE to the UPDATE: Blogger folk – here’s what you need to know to set your comments to allow links to blogs on other platforms. First, you need to log into your blog via Blogger in Draft, which is a kind of sandpit or beta Blogger that exists, supposedly, so that you can play with Blogger features before they’re actually released. What the hell is that? They implement a feature (OpenID) blog-wide on the main platform but you can only change it from the beta??? O-k-a-a-a-y… Anyways, once you’re in Blogger in Draft go to Settings->Comments and check ‘Registered Users – Includes OpenID‘

So, after spending ten minutes figuring this out, and with help from someone who was clued-in, I don’t feel quite as bad that I flew off the handle at Blogger. What kind of idiots alter their current release software to take away utility that existed previously and that can only be restored if you happen to be running the beta? And where is the notification on your Blogger Dashboard that says ‘Parts of your blog have been changed, and will not be accesssible to you unless you go and log in to another site entirely’?

I say to you again: WordPress, peeps.

UPDATE: rd5 comments that the reason this happens is due to Blogger implementing OpenID! So all you folks on Blogger, please read the comments on this post to find out how to allow other blog platforms to get active links. And I’ll just go eat a slice of Humble Pie that comes direct from the Oven of Shame set at gas mark ‘Egg on your Face’ ‡

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Once upon a time, so long ago that it seems like just a bad dream, Tetherd Cow Ahead started its life on the Bloggerâ„¢ platform. All went well for a while, and indeed, I am grateful that Bloggerâ„¢ was such an easy way for me to start The Cow rolling.*

But then, not long after Bloggerâ„¢ was acquired by Googleâ„¢, things started going haywire. There was the dreaded ‘smenita’ affair that intermittently took down Bloggerâ„¢ Comments for weeks. After that, there was a several-week-long crapshoot in which nobody (including me) could tell whether or not The Cow was likely to be functioning or commentable. This was made aggravatingly worse by the fact that Bloggerâ„¢ personnel went completely incommunicado, and made no effort whatsoever to let users know what was going on, let alone apologize for the problems. Then there were numerous smaller but infinitely annoying shutdowns and faults that served to make a quick read of The Cow into an interminable chore. Again, with no explanations from Bloggerâ„¢. After weeks of frustration I’d had enough and (with surprisingly little effort) I migrated The Cow over to WordPress where I’ve maintained it with no trouble ever since.

Only now, it seems, I have cause to bitch about Bloggerâ„¢ once again.

I visit many friends who have their digs on Blogger.â„¢ Up until now, whenever I have left a comment, I have been able to enter my name as either a user from a Bloggerâ„¢ account (which I can do, since my old account is still active)†, a name & url combination (which creates a direct link on my name to the url, in most cases TCA) or post anonymously.

My preference is to leave my name linked directly to my (non-Bloggerâ„¢) blog. This means that if you want to visit my blog, you simply click on my name.

Over the last few days though, I have noticed a disturbing difference in the way that Bloggerâ„¢ allows a visitor to comment: now, instead of having the option to link my name to a url, I am only allowed a non-linkable ‘nickname’. Either that or I must have a Bloggerâ„¢ account. In other words, I can no longer leave my name as ‘reverend anaglyph’ and have it link back to Tetherd Cow Ahead.

This is a really shabby and pathetic impediment for Bloggerâ„¢ (and one must therefore assume Googleâ„¢) to have foisted on its users. It effectively says to your commenters: you cannot comment and be linked to your own blog without being a member of the Bloggerâ„¢ club. It is, in fact, antithetical to the very concept of blogging.

If you have been thinking about shifting your blog elsewhere (and I do recommend WordPress supported by your own host if you can afford it) then now is the time to do it, as a protest to this extremely Microsoftian draconian imposition. Either that, or write to Google/Blogger™™™™™ and use strong language on them.

Blogging is about interaction, not about clubs & closed doors. These kinds of ideas will bring the utility of the internet to its knees if they get a grip. Acowlytes! Protest them, and protest them strongly!

ADDENDUM: And here’s a thought: if, in the course of your wonderful philosophizing, you manage to attract new readers to your blog, and they reside on platforms external to Bloggerâ„¢ (and there are now dozens of free blogging sites) you can almost certainly kiss them goodbye as new connections in your blogging circle. Why? Because no-one will be able to follow them back to their own place to engage in the community that is set up by such a practice. Why should they visit you and engage in your show if their is no possibility of reciprocation? My best blogging buddies – indeed, nearly all my current blogging friends – came here via other people’s blogs, often on other platforms.

If you think I’m over-reacting a bit on this, go spend some time trawling around a closed community, like, oh, MySpace let’s say, and see exactly what calibre of intellectual tête-à-tête a whole lot of inbreeding gets you.

For my own part, this very problem has prevented me from engaging in the TypePad and LiveJournal communities – every time I find myself at a TypePad blog and want to strike up some banter with the writer, I am supposed to ‘Join Up’ to do so. Bollocks! They’re gated communities by any other name, desperately trying to keep out the riff-raff.

Viva la revolucion! To the guillotine with the lot of them!

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‡TCA consumes and recommends The It Crowd.

*And as we all know, a rolling cow gathers no moss! (Cow rolling should not be confused with cow tipping which is a different thing altogether)

†On a technical note: I’ve hacked my Blogger site in such a way that if I do leave my Blogger name, you now never see my old blog – instead, you are whisked immediately to the proper home of TCA. I’m lucky – I know how to do these things, but it’s probably outside the capabilities of many less technically inclined bloggers.

Hey CowPokes!! Don’t Forget: the Christmas Competition is still running! Be sure to get yer entry in!

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The people at RadioShack have been running a rather clever advertising concept illuminating their ‘Do Stuffâ„¢’‡ slogan. Briefly, it involves demonstrating how to accomplish some task, such as shooting candid nature shots of wild animals, by buying off-the-shelf RadioShack items and repurposing them.

Being a bit of a techno-geek, I respond very well to this kind of idea, so I’ve been checking in with the RadioShack site now and then to see what else they’re coming up with. Amusingly, the current (December) offering sees the RadioShack Geek Department comprehensively out-clevering itself in an enthusiastic bid to ratchet up the Christmas shopping turnover.

The concept is outlined in easy-to-follow steps under the uber-tekky, up-to-the-minute-geeky* title Caroling 2.0 and this pitch:

When the weather outside is frightful, and the fire is so delightful, it can be pretty hard to get excited about caroling. Luckily, all it takes is technology and a little know-how to sing to the neighbourhood, without dashing through the snow.

To synopsize the idea: you video yourself singing Christmas carols, edit the results and transfer them to your iPod. You attach your pod and a little speaker to a radio-controlled toy truck and then, from the cosy comfort of your living room, drive it off to your neighbours’ houses to infuse them with jolly musical holiday cheer (and all of the aforementioned tech-toys are purchased from RadioShack, of course). Easy peasy, eh?

Or, as the RadioShack Geek Department rates it:

Difficulty: Easy
Time: About an hour
Result: A new holiday tradition

Here at the Tetherd Cow Geek Department, we think it would go slightly differently:

Difficulty: Somewhat easier than assembling an IKEA bookshelf. But not much.
Time: How good is your singing and how competent are your editing skills?
Result: One stolen iPod & RC toy

Aside from anything, isn’t the whole point of Christmas caroling that you get together with a bunch of friends and trudge through the snow in order to spread the neighbourly Christmas spirit? And so you can trudge back again and enjoy brandy and eggnog and chestnuts roasting on an open fire?†

Sigh. Obviously I have, once gain, been left behind by the latest trends.

These days, it would appear, with a RadioShack purchased Wireless AV Sender, a RadioShack purchased camcorder and some RadioShack purchased AV cables, not only will your kids get see mommy kissing Santa Claus, they’ll be able to project the whole sordid affair as it happens, for all the world to see, using a RadioShack purchased video projector pointed at a convenient neighbourhood snow drift.

So with that thought in mind, a Special Tetherd Cow Christmas Competition!

Your task: re-imagine a Christmas tradition using a combination of products from the RadioShack catalogue. Keep it realistic (ie, feasible), make it purposeless (points will be deducted for anything deemed useful), make it inspired, and make it funny. If possible, refer to the lyrics of your favourite Christmas song.

There will be a prize for the cleverest invention. And it will be a special one.

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‡Is it just me, or is all this trademarking starting to get A Bit Out Of Handâ„¢?

*Sarcasm (in case you think I was being serious).

†Well, I dunno. We don’t have anything like snow or icicles or Frosty the Snowman here of course, but from watching all the American films, I certainly got the impression that that’s what it was all about.

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Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I’ve just encountered ‘the world’s first interactive natural spring water – H²Om Water with Intention‘ Yes, you heard right: H²Om, as in Ommmmmmmm…

You can visit the website if you’ve got the stomach, but I’ll save you the pain: these people are selling bottled water that has been infused with nothing other than (supposedly) positive energy. From their blurb:

H²Om water with intention has revolutionized the bottled water industry by creating the world’s first vibrationally charged, interactive bottled water.

Got that? The water is vibrationally charged. And, to reiterate, it’s also interactive. If your Bullshit Detector Meters haven’t pinned yet, allow me to elaborate: the concept behind this water appears to be that those who drink it think about positive things while they are doing so, and then this somehow makes the water better. It’s not explained exactly how this works, nor in exactly what way the water is better. It’s just better.

The H²Om people have trademarked the slogan Think It While You Drink It™ a catchphrase that simultaneously illuminates the stupidity of the Trademarking system and the brainlessness of anyone who believes that a witless motto such as this actually means anything.

H²Om’s Vibration Hydrationâ„¢ (Oh Spare Me!â„¢) comes in seven great vibrational ‘flavours’: Love, Perfect Health, Gratitude, Prosperity, Will Power, Joy and Peace (I swear I’m not making this up).

Now I want to emphasize here, in case you didn’t get it, that these ‘flavours’ aren’t actually anything, like, flavoursome. If you buy a bottle of, say, ‘Joy’, it’s going to taste exactly the same as ‘Prosperity’- it’s only the vibrations that will be different (shit, I’m laughing as I type this – it’s so much like a parody I can’t actually believe that these people are serious).

Best of all, if this water doesn’t unequivocally bring you Peace/Joy/Love/Pretzels, H²Om have the ultimate escape clause: the water is interactive you loser – if it’s not working it’s your fault!

Still not with me? Still giving them the benefit of the doubt? Not laughing as much as me yet? Then read on:

As an added bonus, once our water is in the bottle, we play a restorative compositions of music, frequencies, and spoken word to the water.

Spoken word? Wha?

Nice water. Nice joyful pretty water. I love you water. You are the best water in the universe. Pretty pretty water. Lovely watery joyful prosperous water.

Seriously. It’s going to be something just like that, right?

Yup. If there’s one thing this website doesn’t lack it’s pages of incomprehensible waffle:

There are several distinctive vibrational frequencies that are infused in each bottle of H2Om. The First is the vibrational frequency of the label. The use of words, symbols and colors on the label. Each bottle contains the symbol of the Absolute “Om”. It also contains the vibratory word “Love” or “Perfect Health” etc. written on the label in many of the world’s languages. A specific color vibration has also been chosen for each bottle, this color coordinates with the corresponding chakra.

Now I know what you’re going to say – this is all flimsy bollocks and no-one is going to fall for this claptrap without some kind of basis in fact! Well, it’s just about now that H²Om wheels out its supporting ‘evidence’ for their miraculous product, and it comes in the form of an endorsement from a personage who was slated to appear in a future edition of the TCA Educational Series ‘Woo Woo Beliefs‘, a minimally educated Japanese ‘doctor’* Masaru Emoto. Some of you may have seen Dr Emoto’s claims promoted in the risible What the Bleep do We Know, a film that is rooted in reality to about the same extent as, oh, your average Warner Brothers’ Roadrunner cartoon.

To encapsulate, Dr Emoto has formulated some ideas (it’s absurd to call them hypotheses, since he doesn’t even pretend to adopt any form of scientific protocol) that water crystallizes in certain ways according to its response to people’s thoughts and emotions. That’s all you need to know – I’ll examine Dr Emoto further at a later time. It is sufficient to note that the H²Om people are so besotted by Dr Emoto that they have made him a partner in their company and are in the process of launching a new line with his imprimatur.

And you know what? I just bet they have the box-office attendance figures for What the Bleep framed on the H²Om office wall, with all the zeros emphasized in fluorescent hi-lighter.

Given the size of that demographic, it’s evident that H²Om’s marketing is dead accurate in one respect anyway: it is very obviously water with intention. Oh yeah. Intention of the people who make it to get filthy rich by exploiting the gullibility of simpletons.

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*His ‘doctorate’ in Alternative Medicine was awarded by an uncredited pay-your-way ‘university’ in India. Make of that what you will.

Thanks Sean for bringing the H²Om website to my attention.

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Oh for Pete’s sake. Another nutcase has found ‘an image of the Virgin’ on a tortilla sandwich cinnamon bun fencepost pizza pan underpass pebble.

The Holy Pebble was found on a beach in New Zealand by a woman who had ‘an awesome run of luck’ after picking it up. Evidently the awesome run of luck wasn’t permanent since she’s put the Sacred Item up for online auction. Twice. The first time, the winning bid was a hoax. Dang. A hoax! Some people will do anything!

Unbelievably, for Round Two, there are as of this writing, already bids of many thousands of dollars.

A New Zealand Catholic Church spokesperson said the church was ‘cautious’ about responding to claims of holy images of the Virgin Mary, because many turned out to be fakes.

Smack me with a plank from the True Cross! Fakes? No way!

Thing is, you have to be pretty careful when it comes to seeing likenesses in patterns on pebbles. Look at it one way and some might see The Virgin but flip the picture upside down you’ll get an idea of exactly what kind of forces this woman is really messing with.

Jasmuheen grabs a midnight snack.

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series

Hello and welcome. Today we begin a new series here on The Cow – an examination of some of the, er, more unusual beliefs held by human beings. I’m not talking about your common garden-variety misapprehensions like homeopathy or free energy, but the real The-World-Is-Flat/Aliens-Are-Among-Us delusions of certified fruitcakes. And to show some impartiality I’m not even going to go straight for the easy pickings of American loonies, but instead start with an Australian.

This is Jasmuheen. She is a Breatharian.

Jasmuheen believes (or she says she believes – these are two very different things…) that she doesn’t need to eat any food or drink any water to survive. At all. Ever. In scientific terms, this qualifies her as an idiot.

Breatharians like Jasmuheen say that instead of consuming the nutrients that our species has needed for several hundreds of thousands of years, they are instead able to live on a mystical energy called prana, a Sanskrit term that refers to a kind of ‘life-force’. Indeed, many Breatharians assert that they can bypass prana entirely and live exclusively on sunlight. Well, why not, eh? Plants can do it. Jasmuheen herself has written a book called Living on Light: A Source of Nutrition for the New Millennium in which she outlines a 21 day program that will stop your body from aging and allow you to achieve immortality by living solely on light.

I can hear what you’re saying: if Breatharians live only on sunlight, how do you tell one from a philodendron? Well, effectively, you can’t. Certainly they are the intellectual equivalents of philodendrons. They also typically exhibit a greenish skin colour after several weeks without food or water.

Jasmuheen, or Ellen Greve as her name appears on her income tax file, runs an organisation known as the CIA. Hahahaha! No, young fella, sit down there, it’s not the Central Intelligence Agency of the good ol’ US of A (even though that would explain a lot) but the Cosmic Internet Academy!!! (WARNING: SANITY-SAPPING RAINBOW ALERT if you click on that link). Taking a quick spin ’round the CIA website we can find, among other things, information on Interdimensional Field Science, handy facts about Divine Nutrition Research, and Breatharian suggestions for ‘eradicating world health & hunger challenges’ [sic]. Well of course! Just let poor people eat air!!! Problem solved! Doh! How the hell could we have missed that!

Here you can also see (and purchase, should you, for some reason, take complete leave of your senses) Jasmuheen’s ‘art’. You can even experience her incomprehensible babbling pearls of wisdom directly via one her her many YouTube appearances, such as this one:

If you’ve bothered to endure that video, here are some things you might like to ponder:

• In the interview, there is a jug of water on the table in front of Jasmuheen – who is it for?

• There is a some kind of palm tree behind Jasmuheen – is it my imagination, or does she seem agitated that it is hogging all the light?

• After listening to what Jasmuheen has to say, who do you think would make the more formidable Scrabble opponent – her or the palm tree?

In 1999, the Australian version of 60 Minutes put Jasmuheen’s claims to the test under controlled conditions. After Jasmuheen had fasted for four days the experiment was terminated on the advice of Dr. Berris Wink, president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, who was monitoring her vital signs. In the doctor’s professional opinion, Ellen Greve was in danger of dehydration and kidney failure if she went any longer without water.

Jasmuheen, on the other hand, says that ‘60 Minutes stopped the experiment after 5 days ((In the manner of such charlatans, she is quite prepared to distort the statistics to make her feat seem more impressive.)) fearing I would be successful which could create problems for them as their intention was always to portray me as deluded…’ ((Interestingly, this claim has been removed from Jasmuheen’s main website, but you can read the cache here.))

In addition to the absurd beliefs that you’ve read so far, Jasmuheen further contends that due to her pranic sustenance her DNA has somehow altered from the standard two strands usual in all living things, to twelve, and now her body is able to ‘take up extra hydrogen’. ((Even if this nonsensical assertion had any merit, she has nowhere elaborated on why any of this should be desirable. Further, she has declined to allow a blood test to definitively settle this claim, saying: ‘I don’t know what the relevance for it (the blood test) is.’)) Also, in her capacity as ‘an Interdimensional Field Scientist’, she writes that ‘crop circles have always represented a Sacred Geometric Language that is designed to trigger various reactions and awakenings among various people’.

So to recap, Jasmuheen:

• Says she lives on solely on sunlight;

• Claims her DNA is different to all other living things;

• Believes that crop circles are alien messages;

Hmmm. Difficult to understand how anyone could perceive her as deluded.

Anyway, should you somehow receive an invitation from Jasmuheen to attend a Breatharian party, my suggestion is that you eat beforehand, because you know that all she’s likely to offer up in the way of refreshments is a light snack.