Space oddity
SHAKESPEAREAN actor and big friendly giant Mark Rylance has been keeping Prince Charles up to date on alien activities, reveals the Sydney Morning Herald. “I’m his crop circle counsellor,” the Oscar winner told Stephanie Bunbury. “I send him my crop circle calendars and magazines that I buy and keep him informed”.
No word yet from the prince on whether the cereal farms producing his Duchy Originals biscuits have been plagued by alien vandals. Is this why the royals are so often seen patrolling their estates, shotgun in hand?
Advertisement
Making a splash
TENSIONS in Hampstead, London, are boiling over as residents face the installation of internet-linked water meters in their homes. But it’s not the prospect of per-litre water tariffs that has some of them frothing.
“Monica Backes writes: “Regarding Patrick Fenlon’s note on truncated sentences, for many years a broken sign outside the city of Plymouth, UK, welcomed visitors to ‘The City of Disco’.”“
A leaflet hand-delivered to homes in South Hill Park claims that the electromagnetic emissions from smart meters can strip the lead from pipes and poison the water. The document also claims the meters are “making us all electro-sensitive” and “cause trees, plants and bees to die, allegedly”. Further information, we are told, can be found “on YouTube”.
Is there something in the water in north London?
Full metal jacket
FEEDBACK often reaches for a trusty tin foil hat to deflect alien mind control signals, electrosmog from smart meters and unwanted company. However, the efficacy in two of these categories is open to question, says Eugene Girardin, because we are using aluminium foil. “Surely, to screen radio waves you have to use ferromagnetics (iron or steel) to exclude the magnetic component,” he says. Do our shiny shields leave us open to electromagnetic attack? How can Feedback build a better version? Answers on a postcard please – or by radio mind wave.
WESLEY PAWLOWSKI is left paralysed with indecision by the instructions printed on the side of a bag of white sugar. These caution him: “This packaging material is not recyclable in Australia. Please dispose of thoughtfully.”
“I have spent some time deciding on how thoughtful I need to be, but I cannot decide on whether to bury it, burn it or send it overseas,” says Wesley. “It appears to be made of paper, so what is the problem?”
To which Feedback replies: we think that’s quite enough thought devoted to a paper bag.
Soured cream
FURTHER to the observation by Chris Smith that Anchor mature cheddar needs to be zip-sealed to stay fresh despite being “Slowly Matured / Since 1886” (14 May), Andy Howe offers a dairy product that appears to have inverse properties. His carton of Elmlea cream alternative boasts that the product “Lasts longer once opened”.
If this is the case, “I wonder why they sell it in sealed tubs?” says Andy.
Bitter pill
IN LIVERPOOL, the local NHS Clinical Commissioning Group has turned off the tap funding homeopathy, a decision the organisation’s governing body came to after considering public opinion, national guidance and the niggling fact that homeopathy doesn’t work.
Understandably this is bad news for the small number of patients currently receiving treatment, but Feedback expects they can take heart knowing that, as the homeopathy budget dwindles to an infinitesimal balance, its .
Wax on
PREVIOUSLY, our attention was drawn to the perils of automatically shortened text. Hillary J. Shaw writes that he used to purchase a weekly geology magazine named Treasures of the Earth, which came with a small mineral sample attached to each copy. However, “when I bought this magazine at the newsagent, the printed receipt invariably read ‘Treasures of the Ear’.”
Animal bar
FROM Australia, Tom DuFresne reports: “In my 20 years as a zookeeper, often a pretty smelly job, the best smell of the day was always the tiger’s paws.”
Tom claims that these smell like chocolate, a story that sounds to Feedback like the kind of prank seasoned zookeepers might play on work-experience staff.
Feedback doesn’t plan on confirming whether tiger paws smell like bundles of chocolate coated sickles – maybe one of our braver readers will.
Scratch and sniff
MORE odd smells from a land down under: Sarah Eccles in Canberra reports that the male koala “has a scent patch on his chest that smells just like passion fruit”.
Blocked nose
IN REGARDS to smelly trees (21 May), Chris Whitfield writes to tell us “Stercula was the Roman god of the privy, and his name is given to a group of trees, the Sterculia family, also known as stinkwoods.”
Chris says that a Roman working with the wood might have exclaimed quid olet sed redolet non sed rosae: “The smell that arises is no smell of roses.”