Cows

The Medieval (not ‘Mid-evil’, by the way) form of biological warfare did not involve sending people anthrax in their mailboxes, but sending them carcasses of rotting bovine flesh via airmail.  A handy trebuchet was just the mechanism for the trick.  True catapults – the crank-the-winch type – were a bit more dangerous and not as efficient; but the trebuchet, a European adoption and adaptation of an Eastern invention, could really give your cow wings (…I wonder if the “Red Bull” proprietors are ancestors of the first trebuchet users).   Though the bovine species are some of the most financially profitable of the animal kingdom, with their beef and milk products providing daily sustenance to the very poor and the very rich – but not necessarily the middle economic classes – they are perhaps some of the more dull animals concerning cranial vault capacity to body size ratio.  Perhaps that is why they need cowboys…I mean cattle technicians…to herd them into place; of course, maybe its not so much the cattle technician that they are afraid of as it is their more muscular, swifter equestrian friend that the cattle technician is riding, but I can’t say for sure, as I am not a cow.  That is what is possibly most fascinating about cows – they are less than brilliant, more than slow, and can have their utter excretions Pasteurized and homogenized, and yet, they are venerated to near deity status in many philosophies and religions.  I don’t think this is an accident, however.  Could it be that because Aaron, Moses’ brother, was so bull-headed and stubborn and that the Israelites were so used to suckling from the teat of Egyptian abundance and meshing with its culture that what ‘just so happened’ to come out of the fire at the base of Mount Sinai was a golden calf and not a golden eagle or golden tiger.  This cow worship still exists in many parts of the world today – even in hedonistic, secular American culture; not in the form of golden cows, but as our ‘lyrical miracle’ friend Shai Linne put it, in the form of worship of “self and sex and loads of cash.”