I was scanning the cybersky for UFOs and spotted a cow being repeatedly plucked from its pasture in a very funny fashion on a website actually called CowAbduction.com.

The site complains about the “serious problem”, with the number of bovine disappearances nearly 720,000 and on the rise, primarily in California — possibly because the milk is tastier and creamier, it says — but also in 27 other US states and in Europe and Russia as well.

Evidently the cattle go flying off the surface of the planet with a “meee” rather than a “mooo”, followed by silence.

There are offers of support groups for bereaved farmers (those left eating their cereal with water) and several handy products, such as the fearsome, made-in-California, electric “alien cow crow”, designed to scare off predators but reportedly dangerous for everyone concerned.

Victims, witnesses and sympathetic visitors submit photographic evidence of the phenomenon, such as this picture from John Edgecombe of Cornwall, taken from inside the cockpit of a Cessna at 3,000 feet. There are many reports of Unidentified Flying Bovines.

And here’s Scott Walker’s shot of a spacecraft of some sort actually lifting away a cow. He said he was blind for nearly three hours afterward because of the intense light of the beam.

Well, it didn’t take too long to figure out that the website is another clever promotion from the California Milk Processor Board, the same people behind the long-running and ultra-successful “Got Milk?” advertising drive.

This is the campaign that’s had everyone from Andre Agassi to Zhang Ziyi, with Batman, Bart Simpson and Yoda along the way, wearing a milk moustache, and spawned parodies like “Got fleas?”, though the board didn’t care much for PETA anti-dairy “Got pus?” campaign.

Californians will have to forgive me for knowing nothing about the two-year-old Cow Abduction campaign, which took the form of five TV spots ads. I’ve tried to make up for my ignorance with the eyewitness photo of my own, at the top of the post.

Okay, and the one below as well.

Alain de Botton, the Swiss-born, London-based essayist, has written several books about life’s higher pleasures, from goosebump love to great literature, and begs us to join him in striving for nothing but the best in this world.

One of his books is called “Status Anxiety”, which I haven’t read but I’ll bet is a guide to getting rid of it. Another is “The Architecture of Happiness”, summarised on his website as a dismissal of the common criticism of architecture as “frivolous, even self-indulgent”.

Botton, on the contrary, believes “that where we are heavily influences who we can be — and argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential”.

I haven’t read that book either, but a colleague did pass on the following essay by Botton. My old hippie instincts cringe under the weight of such material lust, but it’s a bit of fun …

Happiness: An Acquisition List

1. A neo-classical Georgian house in the centre of London — Chelsea, Kensington, Holland Park. In appearance, similar to the front elevation of the Royal Society of Arts designed by the Adam brothers in 1773.

To catch the pale light of late London afternoons, large Venetian windows offset by Ionic columns (and an arched tympanum with anthemions).

In the first-floor drawing room, a ceiling and a chimney piece like Robert Adam’s design for the library at Kenwood House.

2. A Dassault Falcon g00c or Gulfstream IV jet with avionics for the nervous flyer, a ground proximity warning system, turbulence detecting radar and CAT II autopilot.

On the tailfin, to replace the standard stripes, a detail from a still life, a fish by Velasquez, or three lemons by Sanchez Cotain.

3. The Villa Orsetti in Marlia near Lucca. From the bedroom, views over water. and the sound of fountains. At the back of lhe house, a magnolia Delavavi growing along the wall, a terrace for winter, a great tree for summer and a lawn for games. Sheltered gardens indulgent to fig and nectarine. Squares of cypresses, rows of lavender. orange trees and an olive orchard. There’s more!

Item #1: Thai politics

No, it’s not. It’s “The Sweet-talking Monkey before a Large Swans and Ducks’ Audience”, a watercolour by Alexis Peyrotte (1699-1769) and currently for sale at Sotheby’s Paris for about 5,000 euros.

I hasten to add that I am in no way trying to imply that that’s a royal parasol. Just put any Thai politician you wish under the umbrella, though, and it’s a near-perfect likeness of modern Siam.

Peyrotte was by title Painter to the King and Designer of Furniture for the Crown, basically in charge of the interior decor at Versailles. How he got away with this picture is anyone’s guess. But his flora-and-fauna-intensive paintings did find their way into the London home of Europe’s wealthiest family, the Rothschilds.

Item #2: The American presidential election

Don’t be silly. It’s part of an engraving by Theodorus de Bry of Liège (1528-98), who travelled a great deal around Europe but never laid foot in America. He made this from a watercolour by John White, who actually lived in Virginia colony among the natives he depicted, albeit not particularly well. Sotheby’s New York is selling this one for perhaps $50,000.

I really should keep this stuff for my art blog, Dali House.

“As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.” How ironic that the authorship of these words should spark a slugfest in court. Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that “the estate of Max Ehrmann” ended up in litigation over “Desiderata”, the inspiring essay he supposedly wrote. These are cynical times growing more argumentative by the year.

I recently came across the copy of “Desiderata” that I’ve been dragging around since the late ’60s. Reprinted below, it’s just as fresh and compelling as ever, as crackling in its elegant simplicity as a winter morning. I wanted to get a little background on it before posting it on the blog for the record, and that’s when I discovered that its origin remains perennially undecided, frozen in cryogenic confusion.

“Desired Things”, as its Latin title translates, was first copyrighted in 1927 by Ehrmann (1872-1945), a lawyer and part-time poet in Terre Haute, Indiana. As his descendants like to point out, he evidently wrote in his diary, “I should like, if I could, to leave a humble gift — a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods.”

He wrote “Desiderata” and started passing copies around — without his signature. Circa 1959 the rector of St Paul’s Church in Baltimore, Maryland, included the poem in a collection of devotional passages he distributed to his congregation, and at the top of each page was the inscription “Old St Paul’s Church, Baltimore AD 1692″.

That was the year the church was founded, but at some point this was altered, deliberately or by accident, to read “Found in Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore: Dated 1692.” That’s what it says on the copy I have.

Any confusion that may have arisen was tolerable until 1965, when Adlai Stevenson died and a copy of “Desiderata” was spotted next to his bed. Evidently the former presidential candidate had planned to put it on his Christmas cards.

Stevenson being nationally popular, the story was widely reported, and the poem became famous, particularly among the peaceniks who had always championed him against Eisenhower’s war machine. Now the anti-Vietnam War crowd adopted it. In 1971 Les Crane’s spoken-word recording of “Desiderata” reached the Billboard Top 10 and won a Grammy. There’s more!