Tetherd Cow Ahead

Some Questions, Some Answers and Some Observations

Sally sent me this today, and I am forced to make the assumption that Sally is in cahoots with Fountain-In-The-City on account of the strikingly similar accomplishments in the field of graphic arts displayed in The Secret Key and The Prophetic Code (of which you will recall I have spoken previously).

Let us begin.

The Questions: (if you feel so inclined, read them out loud in a deep reverberant voice for full effect):

What is The Secret Key?

I don’t know, but judging by the picture it gets you into a room with retina-scorching bright light. I am not entirely sure why this would be desirable.

Did you see the Oprah Show about the Law of Attraction?

No. Unless it was the one where Tom Cruise went bananas jumping up and down on the couch. I’ve seen that one. Is that typical of the level of credibility of Oprah shows?

Have you seen the movies The Secret or What the Bleep?

No. But I am familiar with the kind of dopey pseudo-science claptrap they peddle. Does that help?

Some Observations:

OK, this is what I deduce from a semiotic reading of this image: The man in the picture is definitely in need of The Secret Key. At least, he really needs to get into the room with the all the Persil-level luminance since he’s evidently having a lot of trouble making out his Ancient Wisdom by the light of a solitary candle. The hourglass is telling me that he’s running out of time, and the globe of the world under his arm obviously indicates a trip to foreign climes, perhaps to join forces with Tom Cruise on one of L. Ron Hubbard’s old ships to look for hidden treasure. The thing in the top left of frame looks suspiciously like a mandrake root and from this I conclude he intends (once he has some decent lighting) to make an homonculus. He possibly intends the homonculus to be interviewed by Oprah.

Aha! The whole thing falls into place! It’s so frighteningly clear that I knew exactly what I would see when I clicked on the link!

Did you?

Dear Fountain-In-The-City,

Hayley Suggestibull.

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This trash tract courtesy of Universal Head. Visit Headless Hollow and get his take on this too!

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My leafy, tree-lined street is a lovely quiet alcove in the busy inner-city suburb where I live. I remember that, once-upon-a-time, on sleepy mornings, after autumn had shaken a myriad golden leaves from the figs that shade the road, I would sometimes wake to happy tuneful whistling and the swish swish swish of a broom, as my local council cleanup crew swept the leaves up into tidy piles to be scooped into hessian bags for removal. Ah, how peaceful, how efficient, how pleasant on the ears.

That was of course before the introduction of the most heinous contraption ever inflicted on civilization: The Leaf Blower.*

Now Mr Cheerful Whistling Sweeper has been replaced by Mr Evil Scowling Fat Bastard† Noisemaker who tippy-toes down the street, carefully and silently navigating around any crackly dry leaves or brittle twigs that might give advance warning of his approach, to arrive outside my window at 6.59am. There he stands, savouring the oily fumes of his machine, counting to himself the seconds left to the end of the pillowy morning peace. Right on the stroke of 7 he fires his infernal machine into life…

Rrrrzrzrrzrzrrzrrrrzrrgggeeeeererrrzzrzrrzr

Is it possible to imagine a more despicable piece of useless crap than the leaf blower? It is noisy, it uses fossil fuel, makes pollution and it is available to the general public without even the minimal academic requirement of a coupon from a Cornflakes box. And it serves no useful purpose other than to be a substitute for something that is at least as effective, is cheaper, clean, makes an agreeable sound and has stood the test of thousands of years.

I believe that the essence of all evil in the world can be seen distilled in this one abominable invention. That’s what happens when you go against the natural laws of physics and create a device that simultaneously blows and sucks.

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*Although it’s a close contest with the loathsome Jet Ski.

†In my experience, the leaf blower is invariably wielded by someone who looks like they’d get a lot more benefit out of using a broom.

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Spam Observations #36

Natasha wrote to me this morning with this interesting observation:

From: natasha@spamcretins.com
Subject: Unhappy with the way you look?

Did you know obesity kills more and more people every year? We know you hate the extra pounds, the ugly look and the social stigmata attached to fat people…

Social stigmata, Natasha? Maybe you mean social stigma? Stigmata, as we all know, are the bleeding wounds most commonly associated with Christian religious raptures…

But then again, maybe you do mean stigmata, what would I know? There’s an awful lot of things in the world that I wouldn’t know about if not for spam. As if the extra pounds and the ugly look weren’t trials enough, maybe fat people now have to endure sudden bleeding from the hands and eyes in social situations.

If you happen to be one of these porky people so afflicted, my suggestion to you is that you pretend you’re having a vision of Christ. In this way, people will possibly look more kindly on the fact that you’re taking up two seats on the bus and getting blood all over their shopping.

OK. Now I’ve found something that tops even the Steorn bozos’ concepts for sheer technical daftness. Or downright thievery – you decide.

Over at Creative we find this offering for those who don’t have two brain cells to rub together (but plenty of excess cash, I guess) – the ‘Xmod X-Fi Module’ for your PC that actually ‘improves’ your lousy computer sound to an ‘experience beyond studio quality’.

Let me just rephrase that for the slow learners: you stick this gadget in between your mp3s and your speakers and the sound comes out better than the studio recording of the original track!

Shit, I’m going to buy twenty of these and give them to all my Pro Sound buddies. If it can make mp3 sound better than studio recording, then it follows that it can make studio recordings sound better than angels singing the glories of God and His Creation!*

Consider this assertion on the website:

•Restore the details and vibrance that your music lost during MP3 compression

Disregarding first of all that ‘vibrance’ is not actually a real word, let’s examine this claim. First of all, a simplified technical lesson: mp3, or MPEG Audio Layer 3, is a format which is known in the business as a ‘lossy’ form of compression. What this means is that some clever technical hocus-pocus is used to take an audio file and compress it in such a way that some of the less important original data can be thrown away to make the file smaller but (hopefully) without a listener being able to notice too much of a reduction in fidelity.

The key term here is thrown away. To get an audio file (say a CD quality file) down to a much smaller sized mp3, savage and ugly chopping has to be done and the unwanted data is irretrievably blitzed. Chucked. Trashed. Flushed. Things from the original audio file no longer exist in the mp3 file.

Our friends from Creative are claiming that they can somehow reconstitute this no-longer-extant data – raise it from the dead, so to speak – and set it walking among the living once more. Not only that, they are saying that the mp3 will not only sound as good as the CD you ripped it from, but better than that.

There’s a highly technical term for this kind of thing, and that term is CRAP!

In order that they might convince you of their highly dubious hyperbole, Creative offer you the chance to actually hear X-Fi in action. Going on the provided example I might make the suggestion that they should abandon the waffly try-hard ‘X-Fi’ moniker and go for the much more accurate ExcrementSoundâ„¢ label. Using a breathtakingly cliched Flash presentation, the Creative people show us how their X-Fi system can take a perfectly ordinary and dull piece of music and sound like a perfectly ordinary, dull, and sibilant piece of music. Huzzah! They’ve discovered the treble control. Now instead of that fuzzy futzing aliasing of the high frequencies in an mp3 you can have nicely fizzy, ear-scouring futzing aliasing. Wow. Better than studio sound! I know – I try every day to get my sound to be this unpleasant, but fail comprehensively.

Oh, I just can’t go on. The only thing that’s creative about Creative is their ability to effectively recycle that old saw: Never give a sucker an even break.

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*This is a colourful image for comic effect. I do not believe in Creation, angels or God.

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Today in the suburb of Cromer in Sydney’s northern beaches, in terrible hot, windy and dry conditions, a bushfire is burning out of control. It is almost certain that the fire was deliberately lit. Every year in Australia, a significant percentage of our devastating bushfires are purposely started, for inexplicable reasons, by idiots.

On tonight’s news this exchange took place between the ABC newsreader and the New South Wales Rural Fire Chief, Commissioner Phil Koperberg:

Newsreader: Commissioner Koperberg, do you find it surprising that someone was lighting a fire under these conditions?

Commissioner Koperberg: Yes, I do. These conditions provide an exceptionally bad fire risk and fires start easily and spread quickly.

This is how it should properly have gone:

Newsreader: Commissioner Koperberg, do you find it surprising that someone was lighting a fire under these conditions?

Commissioner Koperberg: No I don’t. People are moronic and thoughtless and don’t possess even an ounce of common sense. It’s happened every year for decades and I predict that these cretins are likely to be doing it for decades to come.

It never surprises me these days, and I know that Commissioner Koperberg has a lot more experience in this field than I do.