LOST IN Norway? Trying to find your way by car to the Parallab at the High
Technology Centre in Bergen, for example? Never mind, go to
www.ii.uib.no/komme/index-eng.shtml and you’ll be told how to get there. It’s
quite easy.
“Many of the streets in Bergen are one way so it is easy to get lost . . .
However, all major roads leading into Bergen end up in the spaghetti junction
shown on the right side of the map. Untangle yourself from this junction and
head straight towards the centre of the town (“Fjøsangerveien”, E39). Before you
reach the small lake, position yourself in the leftmost lane. Make a left now
heading down “Strømgaten”. Again place yourself in the left lane and make a new
left turn down “Lars Hilles gate”. Now position yourself in the right lane.
After the first traffic lights follow the lane to the right so that you are
heading back on E39. You are now travelling in the opposite direction on the
road you just arrived on. At the next traffic lights make a right turn down
“Hans Tanks gate”. Position yourself in the left lane and make a left turn at
the traffic lights. You are now (again) heading down “Lars Hilles gate”. Follow
this to the roundabout in “Nygårdsgaten” (500 metres). In the roundabout take
the first exit to the right. Høyteknologisenteret [High Technology Centre] is
now the first building on your left side.”
Did you make it?
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READER Neil Sumner was applying for some information from The Woolwich
building society’s website and received this error message: “Thank you.
Insufficient information was not supplied.”
So was everything just fine?
YOU DON’T need to be a rocket scientist to realise it’s dangerous to leave
pressurised spray cans inside a car sitting in the sun. The danger was
experimentally confirmed recently by someone who left a can of novelty “Wacky
String” in a car in a southern California parking lot.
The sun heated the can until it exploded, propelling it through the
windshield so that it bounced off an adjacent building and landed on the ground
beside the car, strewing the car with glass fragments. Fortunately nobody was
hurt, although the car’s owner probably took some stick for his negligence. He
was parked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
WE ALL know that automation rules in the world of e-commerce, but even so,
something jars about the note at the bottom of the e-mail sent out by CDZone
advertising its recent sale: “Please note that replies to this message are not
read by humans.”
EVER ALERT to the interests of connoisseurs of fine art, we pass on the gist
of a press release picked up last month from the Annals of Improbable Research.
We hope readers will respond to its call.
“Someone,” says AIR, “has secretly monkeyed with the classic plastic
pink flamingo—and outraged connoisseurs are calling for a worldwide
boycott of America’s beloved bauble of bad taste. Genuine classic pink flamingos
have a signature on the butt. The new, monkeyed-with flamingos have no
Բٳܰ.”
The pink flamingo lawn sculpture was created in 1957 by a young designer
named Don Featherstone, and his signature was added to the rump in 1986.
Featherstone retired last year from Union Products, the company in Leominster,
Massachusetts, that makes the birds, and several months later the mould was
altered to remove the Featherstone signature.
“The public was never warned. The manufacturer released these altered
flamingos directly into the wild without doing any environmental testing,” says
Marc Abrahams, editor of AIR, the science humour magazine that in 1996
honoured Featherstone by awarding him an Ig Nobel Prize. “A plastic pink
flamingo with its Featherstone removed is a pitiful thing, probably unable to
survive in nature,” Abrahams said.
AIR and Boston’s Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) are calling for a consumer
boycott of unsigned flamingos . . . If you want to join in, get in touch with
either the AIR or MOBA via the Flamingo Boycott website
www.improbable.com/projects/mingo/flamingo-protest.html.
FOUND BY reader John Wallace on the website for the Dundee Courier
last month: “Astronomers from St Andrews University and the Midi-Pyrenees
Observatory, Toulouse, came up with the new phenomenon, which demonstrates a
slow change in the way the star spins on its axis while working in Australia.”
AND WE liked this headline from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, with its
suggestion of levitation and, should the technology fail, a ghastly catastrophe:
“Sewage treatment site still up in air.”
READER Rachel Caldow purchased a pack of self-adhesive door hooks and was
fixing them as instructed when she noticed the warning “Not suitable for
children under 36 months”.
As she was only planning to hang coats on the hooks, she didn’t mind this
particularly, but wondered in passing whether the hooks were really strong
enough to carry the weight of children over 36 months.
THE INFORMATION on sachets of salad dressing provided by Egyptair
illuminatingly tells users: “Expiry date—one year from production”
BOTTLES of Sainsbury’s own-brand washing up liquid on sale in Cambridge bear
the legend: “Sainsbury’s Original. New formula”.
THE Berol Red Eye Reduction Pen is for retouching photo prints in which
people have red eyes due to reflection from the camera’s flash. It comes with
instructions which include the warning: “Only suitable for use on prints, never
directly on the living eye.”
FINALLY for those whose grasp of even the most elementary mathematics
keeps failing, there’s a condom machine in the basement toilets at Birkbeck,
University of London, bearing the useful reminder: “1 × £1 =
£1″.
