Tragedy!

We cows do like a good bit of disco, so it is sad to hear of the death of Robin Gibb. Hard to pick a favourite from so many classics, but here are some which are particularly loved on our farm:

Grassachusetts
Steakin' alive
Moo win again (yep, I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel now)
More than a cow
Jive mooin'

Grand masticator

Peregrine's been teaching me chess. I'm not very good at it - I keep confusing the prawns with the bishops, for a start - but I am sure I will get better if my teacher is anything to go by. He said, "As the old adage goes, practice makes perfect. Do anything often enough and you will get good at it. Look at Angus, for example. After years of doing it, he's now simply brilliant at talking crap and annoying the hell out of us." He's got a point, I suppose. Angus is the king of bull.

Even Robert Louis Stevenson liked us

He wrote this poem

The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.
She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;
And blown by all the winds that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

Shame it's a bit crap really. Nice sentiment though!

Yet another magnificent cow song

I'm reluctant to ever give credit to humans, but considering Da Vinci, Einstein, and the authors of this song are all humans, I suppose they're not all bad

Cow terms

There are some interesting terms you humans use to describe us cows, for example the following:

Buff - Yellow-reddish colour or a light skin colour. So if a cow says "that bull is buff", she is not referring to his muscular appearance. Or at least not in Peregrine's case. I sometimes wonder how he manages to walk on his spindly little, stork-like legs, but he does give them very little exercise, preferring to do cryptic crosswords, play chess, and generally look down on everyone for being his intellectual inferior

Breed - A genetically pure line having similar conformation and able to produce offspring with the same characteristics. Thanks to Mr A Hitler, Third Reich Farm for that definition

Calf - A sexually immature young cow. I suppose this term could also be used to describe half of the teenage Essex population, but without the "im" part obviously

Dam - Female parent. Probably because cows are quite useful for holding back water.

Muley - Hornless cow. Presumably the opposite of a horny cow, i.e. Kerry

Poll - The space between the ears on top of the head. Unsurprisingly it really confused our resident idiot Sally when I told her people were voting in our first ever poll.

Poll-y cow!

With an astonishing 2 votes so far in the first ever poll, it has obviously fired your imagination. Still, there might be a late surge with the overseas postal vote

Cows are smarter than sheep

What a song!

If I wrote a song about cows, it would be this

Hmm, not sure this ad makes me want to buy the product

I think I would happily choose insomnia over death. It would be great if all adverts were required by law to be as honest as pharmaceutical companies clearly are, though. I'd love to see McDonald's say "Awful food that will make you fat. And we kill cows."

Here's a video of me dancing

Adam Y-ouch

Now I'm not a big fan of white rappers - Eminem is, quite frankly, appalling, and I never got the whole Beastie Boys thing. Bovines much prefer Snoop Dogg. But even so, this must be the worst tribute ever paid by anyone in the history of music - Coldplay singing Fight For Your Right




Yes, Coldplay! I bet Adam Yauch is glad he's dead so he doesn't have to listen to that pile of dung. What next? Phil Collins doing a cover of Smells like Teen Spirit? James Blunt covering Purple Haze?


Just in case Christ Martin is reading, this is how to cover the Beastie Boys

Google Translate - putting translators out of business

Some readers may know of my fondness for Google Translate. As a free tool, it is remarkably clever and accurate. It translates better than a lot of the human translators my editor Denis has seen anyway. So I decided to add a Google Translate widget to my blog. For all you polyglots out there, I was very impressed with its French and German translations of yesterday's statement "to go along with breaking my Indian duck earlier today, I have now also popped my Argentinian cherry":

"zu gehen zusammen mit indischen Ente bricht mir heute früh, ich habe jetzt auch einen Druckausgleich in meinen argentinischen Kirsche"

"pour aller avec mon canard briser les Indiens plus tôt aujourd'hui, j'ai maintenant aussi sauté ma cerise argentine"

I'd just love it if Germans, upon losing their virginity, stood up and announced to the world with pride "ich habe einen Druckausgleich in meiner Kirsche." (I have pressure equalisation in my cherry)

 
Google also has a Translate for Animals app

Aiming for ten posts in one day - a postal strike?

This is, admittedly, getting ridiculous. You wait ages for one single post on the world's premier bovine blog, and then suddenly seven of them come along all at once! A bit like buses, I suppose, but slightly more cow-shaped. Anyway, to go along with breaking my Indian duck earlier today, I have now also popped my Argentinian cherry! Yes, I had my first visitor from Argentina (hello Michael). So here's a word to the people of Argentina:

Murderers!

Stop eating so much steak! We don't like being eaten, you know.

According to the latest statistics, 31% of people in India are vegetarians, in Germany 9% of the population eat no meat, and in France there are 3 vegetarians. In case you were wondering, the percentage sign is not missing there. I'm not sure why I live in France, it seems about as safe for me as Taliban-ruled Afghanistan would have been for the Village People.

Miss, sigh, gone

In a heart-warming video, here's Stevie Wonder playing football.



Okay, apologies for that tasteless and rather substandard joke, but it is true that the video's star would have even failed to hit my bottom with a banjo.

Currying favour

Yes! Finally, after months of fervent hope, I have my first reader from India! You'd think that - with their love of cows - I would have attracted loads of them, but unfortunately this has not been the case. Let's hope this is the first of many, though, so welcome whoever you are! I really am delighted, and to celebrate I think I will have a grass vindaloo for lunch. 

Creeping up to 700 page views

I'm very proud that this little blog has been read nearly 700 times! OK, 650 of those are probably by Russian spambots, but still, 700 views is a lot, so thank you readers! Now, only another 300 to go until my blog will have been viewed nearly as many times as my human friend Ian Desmond's arse*.


*Ian takes great joy in revealing his buttocks in public. Needless to say, this great joy is not universally shared by the public.

Dexter

I can't believe I fitted so much into a single month - probably over 30 hours work, all that chess, regular naps and I finally managed to find time to finish Dexter. What a series! My keenly developed sense of schadenfreude does enjoy a good bit of telly where more humans get killed than cows ("I know, Peregrine, it should be "where more humans get killed than do cows", but I sometimes like slumming it grammatically). Exciting, great acting and characters, and some of the one-liners made me laugh for about 20 seconds. And believe me, it really is a sight to behold watching a cow guffaw.

Make mine a double

See, I've already doubled last month's number of posts. The creativity sometimes just (m)oozes out of me...

Busy, busy, busy

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've been a busy bee. Well, a big, black and white bee made out of beef anyway. Unfortunately sometimes work takes priority, and I've also been spending a bit too much time obsessively playing chess, which is very tough for us cows - we just can't pick up the pieces with our hooves and we usually end up forfeiting the game by knocking over the king by mistake. This month I promise to give you more than last month's huge number of ONE updates though (I'd say at least twice that figure).