EASTER is over for another year, but for one chocolate shop in the south of England the memory lingers on with an expensive pile of useless Easter eggs.
The shop’s speciality is to use a clever machine to trace a child’s – or adult’s – name on the chocolate shell in white icing. Customers take in a list of names – Lucy, Jake, William, Suzanne and so on – then go off to do the shopping and come back an hour later to pick up the personalised eggs.
A colleague was in the shop over Easter to order some of these eggs for younger members of the family. He got chatting to the owner, and was told this tale of woe. A busy mother planning a children’s party had run in, left what looked like a list of names, and dashed off to do her shopping. By the time she came back it was too late. The assistant in charge of the clever machine had already iced a dozen eggs for children with such unlikely names as Bacon, Sausages, Butter, Milk, Tea and Bleach.
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THIS has to be the most far-fetched Nigerian 419 scam yet. “I am Dr Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Astronaut, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde,” it begins. “He was the first African in space when he made a secret flight to the Salyut 6 space station in 1979. He was on a later Soviet space flight, Soyuz T-16Z, to the secret Soviet military space station Salyut 8T in 1989. He was stranded there in 1990 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. His other Soviet crew members returned to Earth on the Soyuz T-16Z, but his place was taken up by return cargo. There have been occasional Progrez supply flights to keep him going since that time. He is in good humour, but wants to come home.
“In the 14 years since he has been on the station, he has accumulated flight pay and interest amounting to almost $15,000,000. This is held in a trust at the Lagos National Savings and Trust Association. If we can obtain access to this money, we can place a down payment with the Russian Space Authorities for a Soyuz return flight to bring him back to Earth. I am told this will cost $3,000,000. In order to access this trust fund we need your assistance…”
In the unlikely event that there are any 51¶ŻÂţ readers daft enough to fall for such a story – or if you would simply like to see the whole text – go to The Register at , which is where we found it.
ARE women the real innovators? Last week’s widely publicised story that young female chimpanzees learn to use tools faster and better than young male chimpanzees (51¶ŻÂţ online news, 14 April) reminded us of another brilliant female called Betty. Described as challenging the chimpanzee’s reputation as the most proficient toolmaker in the animal world, the female New Caledonian crow, which lives at the University of Oxford, constructed a hook out of a piece of wire, something even a chimpanzee cannot do (51¶ŻÂţ, 17 August 2002, p 44).
The report on chimpanzees points out that the learning difference between male and female chimps is similar to that between girls and boys – girls learn to write earlier and better than boys. Perhaps palaeontologists should recheck their assumptions about all those elegant prehistoric stone tools, generally seen as having been manufactured by males. Could the makers have been the original mothers of invention?
THE Pears shampoo bottle that Kathleen Robinson bought stated, unremarkably: “Pears Herbal Care Aloe Vera, Honeysuckle and Vitamin E Shampoo maintains the health and shine of normal hair – for less than the more expensive brands.”
EVEN the most innocent-sounding words can be seized on by diligent spam-busting software. John Griffiths was surprised when a message from a colleague, Orde Eliason, was blocked by his spam filter. Eliason describes himself in his email signature as a “Specialist Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and South East Asian image source”, and his photographs have been used from time to time in 51¶ŻÂţ.
So what could the problem be? Well, it’s that word “specialist”. It contains the name of the “super-Viagra” pill, Cialis. From now on, Eliason has decided, his signature will begin: “Specializing in…”
THE contents page of the April Scientific American summarises a piece in its “Technicalities” section as follows: “Inexpensive robots could be as customisable and user-friendly as PCs”. David Wheeler, who noticed this, comments: “That’s the end of that, then.”
FINALLY, Alix McDonald’s son Iain has only just turned 8 years old, but it seems he is already displaying the keen instincts of a future Feedback reader. While shopping with his parents in a Wal-Mart store, he read a sign saying: “Lower Prices Every Day.”
“That’s impossible,” he declared. “Pretty soon, everything would be free.”
Brian McPherson found these words of wisdom on the box for a Pampas brand lemon meringue: “Warning – contents will be hot after heating”
