THE WORLD of music recently suffered a loss, which could, just possibly, be
science’s gain. Bass player Vanessa left New-York based band Mindless Self
Indulgence—to become an astronaut, they say at
www.mindlessselfindulgence.com.
If you feel like balancing the flow by migrating in the opposite direction,
you’ll need to fit the requirements: just playing a four-string guitar won’t do.
The band manages to overturn most preconceptions by specifying: “Druggies and
men in drag need not apply cuz we got class”.
As a consolation to the disqualified, they offer the online “Mindless-O-Matic
song maker”, a multiple-choice lyric machine. For example, complete the line
“ooohhh [blank] yeah yeah yeah” from the list “zygote, fetus, embryo, baby”.
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ANOTHER gem of personal-safety advertising plops onto the Feedback desk. “MPC
Mobile Protection Chip helps to protect you from the harmful effects of
electromagnetic fields created by mobile phones. . .” announces a smartly
produced brochure, complete with pictures, captioned “Polycontrast Interference
Photography shows how MPC protects you”. Frame one: man, smiling, rendered in
“posterised” contours of bilious colours. Frame two: man using cellphone,
frowning, in same range of lemon, lilac and green but with a nasty black speckly
cloud over his head. Three: as one but using a mobile with—you
guessed—MPC. And, lo! No black cloud.
This looks to Feedback suspiciously like what happens when a computerised
photo-illustrator gets bored and applies the “psychedelic” effects filter in a
program like Corel Photo-Paint. The filter, in turn, is rather likely to be
something that happened when the programmers got bored and a bit silly.
But what marvellous technology claims to remove the black cloud over your
head? The clue is in the biography: “Michael Poynder. . . invented MPC as a
result of over forty years experience of working with gemstones and crystals and
twenty years. . . alleviating geopathic and personal stress.” So it’s official.
Crystal healing is so last century. They’re “chips” now. And they “align the
para and diamagnetic fields”, which would be an achievement if it made sense.
But, rest assured, they’re still “natural”.
MORE CONFUSION about them chemical thingies. Katriona Stitt found this on the
back of a packet of Taylors of Harrogate “half-caff” coffee.
“It’s the perfect compromise. . . great tasting coffee, but with only half
the caffeine so you and your friends can enjoy it all day long. And don’t worry,
it’s decaffeinated with carbon dioxide and not chemicals.”
PRODUCT information gets more and more esoteric. Douglas Benford tells us he
bought a confectionary drink in Devon. It came in a small plastic bottle with
the recycle symbol on it. The liquid was green and it was called Chupol.
It was, it said on the bottle, a “refreshing drink aromatised with sugar and
edulcorants”. The ingredients included “acidulants, antioxidants, colourants and
“authorised aromas”. And, most important of all, the drink contained “a
fenilalanina’s font”.
So now you know.
WITH GREAT patience, colleagues sat Feedback down and explained how it may
make “logical” sense that a 500-gram bottle of tomato ketchup can “contain” 600
grams of tomato. This seems to be the sense of the word “logical” favoured by
computer programmers, meaning the opposite of “actually observable”. But it sort
of works. The water went thataway.
Feedback is still puzzled, though, by the packet of Cypriot smoked sausage
with wine, found gently festering in the in-tray. “Ingredients: Pork, spices,
wine, salt, phosphate, E-numbers. . . not less than 100 per cent meat.”
Apparently they were quite tasty, and caused no serious conservation-of-mass
effects after all.
IF THAT’S not enough variety in your diet, try the mayonnaise bought by
Richard Bartosiewicz of Missouri. “Convenient shatterproof jar” declares the
safety seal on the top. “Makes a great salad”.
Mmm. Crunchy. And one less thing to take to the recycling depot.
EVEN WILDER variety is offered by the “ploughman’s lunch” that John Cossham
bought at Warwick Castle in the summer. Its printed ingredients, he says,
included a generous portion of “ihfgfkhtfth”. By eliminating bread and pickle,
the other ingredients of this traditional English fare invented by an
advertising executive in the 1960s, John deduces that this is a variety of
cheese. But how on earth, he asks, can the makers be certain that they included
exactly 22.12 per cent ihfgfkhtfth?
Feedback should record that John was at the time attending a Festival of
Fools as Jester Jiggleshanks. So you may want to take all this with a pinch of
chemical-free sodium chloride.
CARE INSTRUCTIONS attached to Ikea’s coconut-fibre doormat advise you neither
to dry-clean nor to iron the product.
READER John Munday is a community pharmacist in Yorkshire. The other day he
received a veterinary prescription from a local hedgehog sanctuary for a large
quantity of a systemic antifungal suspension used to treat ringworm.
He was discussing how to get the bottles to the customer when he noticed the
dosage directions on the prescription. It read “2 ml daily per 500-kilogram
bodyweight” instead of “2 ml daily per 500-gram bodyweight”.
He says there was no way he was going to even contemplate delivering to this
sanctuary if they had 500-kilogram hedgehogs roaming about.
YOU CAN never be too careful about what people post on the Web, so it’s
understandable that the renowned search engine Google prints this disclaimer
above all its cached pages: “Google is not affiliated with the authors of this
page nor responsible for its content.”
They are so cautious, they even deny responsibility for their own pages. You
can witness them disown themselves at
www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.google.com/+&hl=en
