Corr blimey
“ #Homeopathy gets ridiculed in the media, yet royalty swear by it. They sure live to ripe old ages…” So sayeth on Twitter Jim Corr, the male quarter of celebrated 1990s Irish band The Corrs.
Indeed, there is something about being born into a life of wealth and privilege that seems to keep one chipper. Must be (a very little) something in the water.
Not feeling so chipper, though, is Corr himself, if his Twitter timeline is at all reflective of his mood. In the past few weeks alone he has collected a dizzying number of stamps on his balderdash bingo card, from pointing to the to retweeting opinions about the .
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Despite protestations from fans (of Irish music and science), Corr also isn’t dropping his anti-vaccine position – although he did manage to meet critics halfway somewhat by accident, musing aloud: meant to get mild childhood illnesses like Measles so as to help prime our immune systems into fighting much greater diseases in later life?”
An inoculation to ward off more serious illnesses? A Corrking idea.
Seek and ye shall not find
Winning in the STEM skills stakes, meanwhile, is blond bombshell Boris Johnson, whose aspirations to become the next UK prime minister have, somewhat indirectly, led him hobby of constructing model buses.
Arise conspiracy theories more left-field than Jim Corr’s tick-box efforts. A post on the consultancy Parallax suggests Johnson’s actions are those of a Machiavellian political operator of unparalleled genius in search-engine optimisation.
A man not short of torrid relationships, Johnson’s previous with buses is proving particularly vexing. During the UK’s Brexit referendum, he famously used the side of a red bus hired by the campaign to quit the European Union to deliver promises about the amount of money an exit would bequeath the nation’s public services – promises that led to accusations that they were, in fact, lies, and an attempt to take him to court over the matter.
What better way to send those earlier inconvenient headlines plunging down the search rankings than to invent a cock-and-bus story?
Or indeed a story about a story. Checking for the effectiveness of the scheme by typing “Boris bus” into a well-known search engine on our mobile teleconnecting device, Feedback discovers that the first page of results is largely devoted to stories about whether the candidate is an evil cyber genius for contriving to create a story to displace other inconvenient stories.
And now we’re adding to it. Sigh. But sweltering in a traffic jam in an unexpected burst of London heat, we are at least glad to see the first of our search results directs us to the New Routemaster, a retro model of London bus introduced by Johnson in a former life as the capital’s mayor. The double-decker is infamous for roasting its inhabitants in the heat of summer. Sadly it seems some legacies are less easily expunged.
It’s a negative
It may be dehydration kicking in, but Feedback thinks that if life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And if life gives you 1000 lemons, and you are a mechanic, try making a battery strong enough to jump-start a car.
Russian YouTube channel Garage 54 did just that last month, constructing a zesty power pack capable of getting 13 volts from 60 kilos of lemons. Unfortunately, the meagre current generated by the device and the non-existent charge-storage capacity of the fruit meant the lemons would have been better used for biofuel.
The intrepid engineers calculate that, based on their experiment, they would need 66 million lemons to summon enough juice to start a car. Which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “being sold a lemon”.
Eye watering sums
Talking of lemons, Feedback previously pondered what the costliest piece of equipment ever trashed by a forgetful user is. Bids began at $3billion, the price of the Indian nuclear sub nearly scuttled by an open hatch (22 June).
“The winner must surely be the (eventually magnificent) Hubble Space Telescope,” writes Herman D’Hondt. At launch our orbiting eye on the cosmos cost around $5 billion, but proved unusable thanks to a badly polished mirror. “Adding mirror repair and other fixes brings us to a total cost estimated at about $10 billion,” says Herman. Any advance?
Hungry for love
The course of true love never did run smooth, but if your date is spooning chocolate pudding into your mouth, you are probably on the right path. So say Colin Hendrie and Isolde Shirley at the University of Leeds, UK. They have been watching reality TV show First Dates, in which lonely hearts are filmed meeting for the first time in a restaurant. Their goal? To see whether “courtship feeding” is a sign that love is blossoming.
In their study Appetite, they reveal that of 792 dinner dates, participants fed each other on 58 occasions. Women most often shared their food, typically a chocolate dessert. Of those couples who participated in courtship feeding, a mighty 93 per cent said they would be willing to go on a second date – compared with just 43 per cent of plate-hoggers. So now we know: the way to the heart really is via the stomach.
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