READER Jeff Moore couldn’t help but wonder at the packaging of the Lundberg Honey Nut Rice Cakes he bought at his local grocery store. It assured him that the food “Does not contain nuts”. Dare Jeff presume that the honey, at least, is present?
We, too, are busy wondering, along with Martin Gregory of the online Really Magazine, why the product describing itself as “crispy seaweed”, which is on sale in UK supermarkets such as Sainsbury and , contains nary a hint of seaweed, but is instead made of cabbage, spring greens or pak choi.
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Like Martin, we were under the impression that there is a law against this sort of thing – that if you describe a product as “chocolate cake” it has to have chocolate in it, and if you say it is “orange juice” then juice from oranges is what it must contain. What’s so special about nuts and seaweed?
“From the department of the blindingly obvious: Jack Harrison bought some long-life light bulbs. The packets informed him that “2000 hours = 2 x 1000 hours”
Up to infinite broadband speeds
THE “up to” disease is obviously infectious. As we reported on 6 February, the telecoms industry loves using these words to disguise erratic broadband speeds. Now Japanese electronics giant Sharp tells us its new, greener LCD TV “uses up to 40 per cent less electricity… than traditional LCD TVs”.
What’s more, in an effort to get journalists to use Sharp’s electronics at home, those who attended the greener TV launch were given a card promising “up to 40 per cent discount on all Sharp products”. That’s 1 penny off a £100 purchase, perhaps?
Meanwhile, readers Jon Chard and John Winters have both spotted a new variation on the “up to” theme. Recent adverts from Richard Branson’s cable and broadband company Virgin Media claim in one breath “up to 50 megabit broadband speeds” and in the next that this is “infinitely quick”.
Is this thanks to a magical compression system that squeezes infinite speeds from an “up to” 50 megabit connection, our readers wonder. If so, should someone with an existing “up to” 10 megabits connection now be able to expect speeds of one-fifth infinity? But as that will still be infinity, why pay the extra for 50 megabits’ worth of infinity? Especially as “up to infinity” presumably still includes no speed at all.
The case of the crazy countdown timer
On 20 February we reported that the Vancouver Community Network still hosts a remarkably uninformative web page about that was first noticed by a Feedback reader 14 years ago. Robin Edwards went for a look, and found, in the same section of the VCN’s website that explains how to write a web page, a demonstration of a countdown timer (see ). This purports to tell us exactly how far away we are from the start of 2 January 2000.
Evidently the counter originally looked forward to this date, but since it has now passed, things have become a little confused. When we looked at it on 16 April 2010, it told us that we were minus 9 years, 8 months, 15 days, 21 hours, 11 minutes and 32 seconds away from the moment in question. Five minutes later, the minutes count had decreased by 5.
Quite what it is now counting down to, we haven’t yet worked out – and we can only speculate on what other oddities the VCN has up its cyber-sleeve.
Plus or minus 20th anniversary
OUR gratitude goes to the BBC for opening up new possibilities in the field of anniversaries. Time was, reader Ken Hawkins points out, when celebrations of notable anniversaries were usually reserved for 100 or possibly 50 years after the event. Then we crept down to 40, 25 or even, as with November 2009’s media commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years.
Now the BBC publication Radio Times has proposed a further breakthrough. Its report on the BBC’s Who Needs Fathers? TV programmes describes them as: “This major series, to mark the 20-odd years since the passing of the Children Act”.
“On this basis,” says Ken, who told us about this, “we are fortunate in not even needing to remember just when the event we are marking occurred.” However, he goes on to explain that the UK Children Act was actually passed 21 years ago, in 1989, and implemented 19 years ago, in 1991.
THE last item in the list of facilities at Hotel Lenno, Lake Como, Italy, on the website of holiday specialist might, Richard Walker thinks, be a reflection of the worldwide obesity epidemic. Items such as “restaurant”, “bar/lounge” and “sun terrace” are followed by: “Complimentary minibus to nearby Spa (approx 3 metres)”.
FINALLY, a caption on the National Geographic‘s online NatGeo News Watch informs us that “The asteroid that ended the 160-million-year reign of the dinosaurs was about 10,000 times more massive than the total mass of the human world population, according to the University of Texas at Austin.”
“Darn it,” says Jeff Gottfred, who noticed this. “What’s that in elephants?”