Tetherd Cow Ahead

So, anyway, the lock on the security grill on my front door* has slowly become harder to open over time and I decide that I need to consult a locksmith.

There is one a couple of blocks from me. I give them a call. Dave, the locksmith, is very helpful.

You should be able to undo two screws and pull out the lock pretty easily. Bring it down tomorrow and I’ll take a look. We shouldn’t need to come out and it will save you money. We’ll possibly need to replace the escutcheon†, the lock, or maybe cut you a new key to the lock. We can probably do it while you wait.

I think it might be that my key is just worn and I need a new one.

Yep, that’s possible too, I’ll be able to tell you straight away.

The next day I take out the lock – Dave was right, it comes out easily.
I walk down to the shop. A buzzer sounds when I open the door. A little fat man comes out.

Hi. Dave?

No, Dave isn’t here today.

Oh, OK. Dave told me to bring my lock down and you could tell me what’s wrong with it. I think maybe I just need a new key.

The guy examines the key and lock.

Nothing wrong with the key. You need a new escutcheon.

Oh, OK, fine. Can you do that for me.

Sure.

He disappears into the backroom. There is some tapping and clunking and a little bit of grinding. He comes back.

There, that’s better.

He turns the key. It looks good. I pay him $13, take it home and put it back in the door. It sticks as soon as I try it. Oops, I think, it’s actually something wrong with the door. Maybe it’s misaligned or something. I take the lock out and turn the key. Nope. It’s still sticking – just like before. I go back to the shop.

It’s still sticking.

The little fat guy peers at the lock and wobbles the key. It sticks. I show him how it works from one direction and not from the other.

I think I might just need a new key – see how badly this one’s worn?

He wobbles the key again.

No, it’s not the key. It has to be in straight and it works – see?

He wobbles the key and it opens.

Yes, I know I can wobble it around and it will eventually open, but I want it to work properly – no wobbling and jiggling. Just open and close.

He sighs. He goes into the back room. There is some sawing and grinding. He comes back. He wobbles the key in the lock.

Ok, now that’s better.

I try it. It sticks two times out of three.

Look, I don’t want it to do this. I don’t care what it takes – do I need to replace the lock? Whatever. I just want it to work properly. Maybe I need a new key made?

He takes the lock into the back room. There is clunking, grinding and more grinding. And more grinding and some tapping. For fifteen minutes. I walk around the shop thinking about how crappy the security is for a lock shop – I could steal a bunch of padlocks, keys and miniature surveillance cameras.

The guy comes back.

There, it’s better.

He wobbles the key to show me. It sticks.

Now look. I don’t want any more of this. I just want it fixed. Do you have a replacement lock. Whatever it takes. I don’t want any sticking. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

He shakes his head and goes into the backroom. I can see him rummaging around in cabinets. Another guy turns up and there is conversation I can’t quite hear, and they both start rummaging. This goes on for another five or ten minutes. Then there is silence. Then, oddly, some more grinding and tapping and clunking. He’s working on the lock again! I stick my head around the door.

Excuse me, what are you doing?

He holds up the lock.

It’s a bit better!

Look. I DON’T WANT YOU TO DO THIS. I’VE BEEN HERE FOR FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. I JUST WANT A NEW LOCK.

We don’t have any locks like that.

He comes back out into the shop and puts the lock on the counter.

That’s all I can do. See, the key has to be level – there’s too much movement. It’s not a good lock.

But it always used to work fine, and it works perfectly from one direction, just not the other. Maybe it’s the key – see the tine is worn and bent. Maybe it works on the tumblers one way and not the other. Maybe I just need a new key that isn’t worn like this one?

He gives me a withering look that says “What would you know about locks you stupid moron with the IQ of a squirrel?”, disappears for three seconds into the back of the shop and comes back with a key that is exactly like a non-worn version of my key.

He puts it in the lock. It works perfectly.‡

*I may live in the most wonderful city in the world, but we still have junkies.

†No, I didn’t know what it was either.

‡This is an entirely true story. It happened yesterday.

Imagine this:

You are on a luxurious cruise liner in the South Pacific (not one of those tacky floating pubs full of bloated tourists in loud Hawaiian shirts – I’m talking 1920s-chandeliers-and-monogrammed-crockery type affairs. Only A1 class analogies here at TCA). A waiter pours you a shot of vodka, but before you even get to take a sip, a careless socialite waltzing across the deck with her dashing lover bumps you, and you drop the shotglass into the ocean. The ship sails on. When you reach port two weeks later, you tell your amusing lost-vodka story to an acquaintance and they say: “Don’t worry, just take a shot glass, go down to the ocean and scoop up some sea water. If you drink it, it will still have the same effect!”

Are you with me? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? You would say to them: “You are a CRAZY FUCKING LUNATIC. No way will it have the same effect!”

If they insisted that it would, then you know that they are into homeopathy, one of the daftest belief systems to have originated this side of Scientology.

(Actually, the analogy I gave above is exaggerated. The usual homeopathic ‘remedy’ has even less ‘active’ material than the amount of your spilt vodka in the entire volume of water of all the oceans on the planet. Seriously.)

It’s hard to know where to start in picking on homeopathy. It’s like shooting a very fat fish in a very small barrel.

A brief lesson in how it is supposed to work (for anyone who’s been on a Pacific island for the last seventy years and thinks the war is still on):

1: You acquire a substance that is meant to have some kind of prophylactic effect.

2: You then dilute it with distilled water so much that there is, in many cases, literally none of the original substance in the remaining liquid.

3: You then swallow it according to a variety of regimes, none of which need concern us here because the preceding two steps have enough nonsense to sink a ship (just riffing on the original Luxury Liner analogy).

In recent times, homeopaths have had to agree (mainly because it is unarguable) that a typical homeopathic remedy contains none of the supposed active original substance. But lately, because they really need to defend a couple of centuries of investment in an increasingly shaky belief system, advocates of homeopathy have come up with a new idea; that even though the original ingredients have been diluted out of existence, the water somehow remembers what was dissolved in it. This concept has come to have been rather surprisingly called ‘Water Memory’. Let me give you a potted explanation of this (stick with me – there’s a lot of willing suspension of disbelief involved): You take a small amount of a substance. You dissolve it in purified water, say, at a ratio of 100:1. Now you do this again, with your 100:1 solution, and you do it again and again and again. Many times. Many, many times. So many times that there is possibly, even probably, no molecule of the original substance left in the water (I’m not making this up). In fact, homeopaths assert that the more times you dilute it, the more effective it is. You simply can’t dilute it too much*. But this is totally OK, because even though there is no remnant of the original substance in the water, it somehow† leaves some kind of ‘imprint’ on the water. This final solution (you may as well call it water, because it is), is the thing that is meant to cure your ills.

I don’t know about you but I when I hear stuff like this I get the urge to do something like staple my hand to a table just to make sure I’m awake.

Thing is, the concept caught the fancy of a few scientists who have a bit more tolerance for loonies than I have, and who quite scientifically thought “Why not test this assertion? It should be easily verifiable in a controlled experiment!” Consequently, lots of non-conclusive experiments have been performed over the last few years. The jury is still out on ‘water memory’ largely because no-one has managed to do a proper double blind experiment on it, but if I was a gambling man, I know where I’d place my life savings.‡

The real mistake these diligent scientists made, though, was that they didn’t consider the whole question. They tried for “Does water have a memory?” but completely missed “What are the original substances that homeopaths choose to dissolve in water, why are they deemed to be effective, and who decided that?”. The scientists fell for a classic magician’s smoke-and-mirrors distraction: they tackled the part of the theory that was mysterious and missed the bit that was just plain deception. But by giving credence at all to a small part of the idea, they lent weight to the entire spurious argument that is homeopathy.

To answer those last three important questions (and I emphasise, these are the things you should really consider if you are even contemplating using a homeopathic treatment): Homeopathy was invented in 1796 by a physician named Samuel Hahnemann and uses an archaic belief system traceable back to the original alchemists, called The Law of Similars. The Law of Similars is basically medieval superstitious thinking that says if you have, say, a stomach pain, then it should be treated by, maybe a pig’s intestine because pigs have a good constitution and hardly ever get sick (!) Or something like that. Truly, it’s that nutty. There is pretty much no rational reasoning, let alone science, involved. Hardly anyone I know who uses homeopathic medicines seems to realise this.‡‡

Let me leave you with one last thought: If homeopathy is a valid concept, then you should beware every glass of water you ever drink. Because, according to the laws of homeopathic ultradilution, every cure and every cause for every illness ever known to humankind has over the millennia passed through, and is ‘remembered’ by, that glass of water. Feel a bit queasy?

Me? I stick with single malt whisky. And I believe in Santa Claus because he’s comparatively plausible.

*There are further aberrant behaviours involved, such as ‘striking’ or ‘tapping’ the container with the final dilution ten times to ‘potentize’ (ugh, even the language is ugly) it to ‘make it more effective’, but I’ve left these out because, well, it’s hard enough to believe this shit even without including them.

†No one has even mooted a mechanism for how this might work. Unsurprisingly.

‡Even generously allowing the benefit of the doubt in favour of homeopathy that there is some kind of effect it must be staggeringly small. In the order of success of about one in a million treatments. This is hardly something you’d want to stake your health on.

‡‡A great thing about The Law of Similars is that in some cases, the ‘cure’ is the disease itself, such as a rabid dog’s saliva being used to cure rabies. But that’s OK, because it’s diluted so much, it isn’t there. Oh, I just can’t go on. Even writing about it is just absurd.

Tetherd Cow Ahead World Exclusive!

Well it occurred to me eventually that you don’t have to take my word for the whole Echo Of a Duck Quack debate; thanks to the wonders of modern sound techniques I can actually provide for you today, possibly for the first time ever on the internet, the quack of a duck with an echo.

So at the next office cocktail party when someone corners you over the cheese dip and expounds knowledgeably that “A duck’s quack has no echo, and no-one knows why!” you can tell them that The Cow says otherwise, and send ’em on down.

A duck quacking… – mp3 file.

A duck quacking with an echo… – mp3 file.

Of course, this now must generate the obvious question: “Can the echo of a duck’s quack start an avalanche?”

I like all the people I work with. They are a bunch of nice folks with their heads screwed on correctly for the most part. But occasionally someone, it is not clear who, will do something uncommonly daft. Like, as happened this week, pinning up on the noticeboard in the kitchen one of those pointless and inane lists that get sent to all & sundry via email by alleged ‘friends’. Needless to say, I have no friends who would dare email me this sort of thing – I have long since trained them to desist. Or I have killed them.

So, having escaped the electronic version of this kind of waffle, you can imagine my irritation in discovering an A4 sheet outlining ‘Some Interesting Facts…’ appearing on the communal corkboard.

The thing is, I really don’t want to read these interesting facts because I know from the outset that they will more likely be nonsensical crap, but, as I stand there waiting for the kettle to boil, my eye is inexorably drawn to the bullet points and I find myself reading…

♦ A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

Oh yeah. I guess. But really, WHO CARES?

♦ There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

Ho hum. I doubt it, but whatever.

♦ There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple or silver.

Yawn.

♦ A 2 X 4 is really 1½ by 3½.

Excuse me while I eviscerate myself.

♦ A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. No-one knows why.

What? I mean, WHAT? A duck’s quack doesn’t echo? I am a qualified sound technician with 25 years worth of practical experience and theoretical study that allows me to put appropriate letters after my name, but even if I was a bus conductor with a certificate in needlework I think I could spot this for the idiotic piece of utter claptrap that it is. Now hear me: a duck’s quack or anything else that is audible to the human ear will have an echo. It’s a fundamental property of acoustics. It is possible, that if a duck quacks softly, then it won’t make a loud enough sound to echo off anything, but (are you listening?) THIS HAS NOT GOT THE SLIGHTEST THING TO DO WITH DUCKS! Try getting an echo off a human whisper – same problem: not enough acoustic energy for the sound to travel somewhere, get reflected and return to your ear. There is no mystery about this. The Duck Quack Furphy is just a dumb ‘factoid’ that some nitwit smoking dried coleus leaves has, in an hallucinogenic haze deemed plausible, and, that through the weight of a million billion emails has gained the kind of weird ersatz credibility that only the internet can bestow.

(Of course, jet-setting pedants among readers of The Cow will be quick to point out that if you stand in Whispering Gallery in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London you can get a bit of an echo off a whisper, but I say to you: for a real treat, next time you visit St Paul’s take a duck with you.)

So, as far as I can determine this list of amazing facts can be divided into two main categories: things that are boring and things that are just plain baloney. This does not surprise me; most of the internet can be classified in that way.

Anyhoo, since I’ve been made to suffer these pearls of wisdom, so must you. Consider:

♦ The real reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to search for water.

No it isn’t.

♦ Celery has negative calories. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.

No it doesn’t.

♦ Between 1937 and 1945 Heinz produced a version of Alphabetti Spaghetti especially for the German market that consisted solely of little pasta swastikas.

No they didn’t.

♦ People say “Bless you” when you sneeze because when you sneeze, your heart stops for a milli-second.

No they don’t because no it doesn’t.

♦ The name Wendy was made up for the book “Peter Pan”. There was never a recorded Wendy before.

No it wasn’t and yes there was.

I am willing to speculate that the kind of people who circulate lists such as this one, are also the kind of people who used to flap Polaroid photographs around in the air to dispense some kind of unspecified mystical aid to the developing process. Or who strew their lawn with plastic bottles of water because they think for some unfathomable reason that this will keep dogs (cats/possums/foxes/goats/wildebeests) from defecating thereon.

I mean, really. Just where has all the critical thinking gone? In Pete World this kind of thi… oh shit! Is that the time? I’m overdue for my Past Life Therapy and my colonic irrigation, gotta run.

A couple of years ago I was working in California, just North of San Francisco and on a day off I visited a place called Bodega Bay which is where Alfred Hitchcock shot the exteriors for The Birds.

Bodega Bay is an unprepossessing little place with not a lot to recommend it save for a great little Mexican diner and the possibility of experiencing weird cold fogs that roll off the ocean in the middle of summer.

Just outside the town I stopped at a roadside shed that promised ‘Salt Water Taffy’ which is something I’d never heard of. Maybe taffy made with the age-old tradition of hand collected sea water, I thought, one of those quaint things that sounds bizarre but actually tastes quite nice, the recipe having been lovingly handed down over generations by laconic elderly candy-makers with laugh wrinkles and plenty of time for a cheeky wisecrack at a young whippersnapper like myself. I went inside and marvelled at the hundreds of different flavours, and, savouring the possibility of banter with the locals asked the girl at the counter why it was called ‘salt water’ taffy.

She looked at me like I’d said “Klatuu barada nicto”, chewed her gum once and said: “Because it’s made near the ocean.”

I bought a bag of the candy, went out and sat near the water and unwrapped what was essentially a chewy glob of sugar saturated with some incandescent alien ‘apple’ flavour. It was truly sick-making. Experimentally I threw one to the seagulls, wondering how many it would take to turn them into a hyperactive flock of murderous killers.