Tetherd Cow Ahead

When it comes to poemin’ the handiest bookmark I have is Rhymezone. Imagine my puzzlement when today I went looking for some rhymes for the word ‘free’.

Cod? Huh?

(It took me several minutes to figure it out).

Do you ever look at things and think… hmmm… I wonder how that came to be? Take this roll of toilet paper (or ‘bathroom tissue’ as the Americans call it, because they can’t bring themselves to say that word. You know. TOILET. This is in keeping with the more comprehensive American belief that if you don’t acknowledge an ‘icky’ thing exists – like, oh, Palestine, say, or sex, or atheists – everything is SO much nicer). ((I exclude from this assessment, of course, Americans who are reading Tetherd Cow Ahead. Or who can read, generally.)) ((Whenever I hear an American say ‘I’m going to the bathroom’ I have to strongly fight the urge to say ‘Really? Again? You must be so clean – you just had a bath a couple of hours ago!’))

Anyway, back to this roll of toilet stuff with which you wipe your ass after you’ve had a shit.

Why is it named in the way it is? Are angels particularly known for their softness? It’s not an attribute that immediately springs into my mind when I imagine an angel. Take this angel, for example. It is the Archangel Michael:

Does this picture say ‘softness’ to you? That spear looks sharp to me. Not the kind of thing I want near my tender parts (I will observe that he has funky shoes though).

Here is another picture of a some angels:

These ones have swords. Would you let angels like this go swinging their sabres around in the vicinity of your nether regions? I wouldn’t. And here’s another picture of the Angel Michael. Can you see what he’s doing with that pointy spear?

Yes! That’s right! He’s aiming to stick it right up Lucifer’s bottom! Is that a caring, comfortable, soft image, my friends? I think not!

So how is it, do you think, that advertising people arrived at the brilliant idea of calling toilet paper ‘Angel Soft’, when it’s apparent to anyone with a modicum of religious art experience that angels are anything but soft? How can they get away with such a blatant untruth? Well, as usual, the ad people have included an escape clause in their work. Did you spot it?

There it is! Those rascally advertising types! They’ve registered the term ‘PS’ and tacked it onto their brand name! Genius!

So, their product can now be called ‘Angel Soft (PS®)’, where the PS obviously signifies:

PS: If it feels like someone’s sticking a sword up your ass, then it’s not our fault. You should have paid more attention in Sunday School.

Whilst texting Violet Towne from Los Angeles airport last week, my iPhone’s auto-correct decided to add a word to my vocabulary:

I assumed, of course, that it wasn’t just pulling the word ‘poundal’ out of its digital ass, so I looked it up. Wikipedia defines a poundal ‘as the force necessary to accelerate 1 pound to 1 foot per second, per second. 1 pdl = 0.138254954376 N exactly.’

It goes on to give some mathematical examples and further introduces the concept of the ‘slug’: ‘one pound-force will accelerate one pound-mass at 32 feet per second squared; we can scale up the unit of mass to compensate, which will be accelerated by 1 ft/s2 (rather than 32 ft/s2) given the application of one pound force; this gives us a unit of mass called the slug, which is about 32 pounds mass.’

But one should take heed:

Note: Slugs (32.174 049) and poundals (1/32.174 049) are never used in the same system, since each exists to solve the same problem and will cancel each other out; both should not be used together.

Got that? Don’t mix up yer poundals and yer slugs. They will cancel one another out and we’d be back exactly were we started.

In the lounge.

Dense? Though much brain cells now, might help you with loss intelligence at normal time.

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This gem photographed by Cissy Strutt.

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Yeah, now see, the problem with this supposedly comforting sign in the elevator in my apartment complex, are the words ‘little danger’. It leaves open the very real possibility that there’s some danger of uncontrollable elevator dropping or suffocation.

You’ll all have heard about the mysterious and sad case of Kristin and Candice Hermeler, the Australian twins who apparently attempted to commit a double suicide ((Only one of them succeeded.)) at a Colorado shooting range a couple of weeks back. The weekend’s Australian Herald Sun ran this headline for the incident:

Suicide twins Kristin and Candice Hermeler had God Delusion in their luggage

The headline is, of course, referring to Richard Dawkin’s book of that name. I say no more than that the two women also had a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment’ ((Tolle is, as you may know, Oprah Winfrey’s guru du jour. I am deeply suspicious of people who think they’ve found the ‘answers to everything’ and especially of those who feel the need to impart this wisdom to others at a price.)) and The Wisdom of the Native Americans among their belongings as well, but apparently those weren’t as headline-worthy. Funny that. ((Shout out to Bruce Hood for catching this one.))

In other Australian newspaper news in the same vein, Cardinal George Pell, a religious man of big pretensions and small intellect, has called those without faith ((We are to take this as Christian faith, it goes without saying. I don’t think Cardinal Pell believes for a minute that Muslims have any leverage with the Invisible Sky Man.)) ‘coarse, uncaring and without purpose’. He accuses atheists of having ‘nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss’, which is odd since it seems to anyone with half a brain that it’s much more appropriate to describe people who hold the fanciful beliefs of religion with those words. Atheists, as anyone with the faintest grasp of philosophy understands, don’t ‘confect constructs’ of any kind, because atheism is simply a lack of belief. And, unlike religious people, we don’t attempt to ‘cover’ the abyss with anything – we just accept it’s there. ((Cardinal Pell’s fear of the unknown is plainly profound. His contemplation of the ‘abyss’ obviously terrifies the wits out of him.))

In the same sermon Pell goes on (quite embarrassingly, in my opinion) to invoke the hoary old Atheism = Nazism argument, and so, via Godwin’s Law, automatically loses all credibility. ((C’mon. We’re tired of this one. It makes no sense. It never did, and it never will.))

George Pell accuses those without faith as being ‘fearful’, when it is plain to all but the most obtuse who’s really the scaredy cat in this picture.