Show me the way to the next whisky box
JAPANESE companies are fiercely competitive. So when JVC scored lots of free publicity by announcing a loudspeaker cone made from birch wood soaked in sake, it was inevitable that some rival would try and top the story.
Pioneer is first. One of the company’s engineers was visiting a distillery of Japanese drinks giant Suntory and saw that whisky was being matured in 100-year-old white oak barrels. He asked for a sample of the wood, took it home and tried drilling holes through it.
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All his drill bits broke because the wood was so hard. So Pioneer is now buying up Suntory’s whisky barrels, steaming them flat to make planks and building loudspeaker cabinets from the planks. The hardness of the wood means it vibrates less, so the sound is purer.
During the cabinet-making process the planks have to be shaved smooth. The ever-curious engineer collected the shavings, put them in a cup and poured hot water over them. He was rewarded by a drink tasting of the finest whisky.
Pioneer is now sending out publicity presents which are boxes full of wood shavings, with instructions on how to turn them into a whisky drink with hot water. The only snag is that the instructions are in Japanese. So foreign recipients of the gifts have been rummaging through the shavings thinking they are packaging for a gift that isn’t there – and throwing a superb whisky base into the waste bin.
“”Luxembourg has successfully been loaded onto your device”, Steve Heggie’s satellite navigation system tells him. How do the Luxembourgers feel about this?”
The reincarnation futures market
IDAN BEN-BARAK, signing himself as president of InMyTime Corporation, is buoyed by the success of his scheme for buying time – you may yourself have noticed how the cost of Thursdays has risen since our report on it (1 April). “As part of our expansion plans,” says a new InMyTime statement, “we have hired a team of past-life therapists to conduct some surveys.” Ben-Barak naturally volunteered to be the first subject, “and it appears that I was Shirley MacLaine in a past life”.
This might seem strange, since she wasn’t actually dead when we last checked. But apparently this kind of scheduling problem happens all the time, and it sorts itself out eventually. InMyTime thinks Cleopatra is to blame, as she has been quite overbooked for reincarnations lately, which wreaks havoc on the system.
InMyTime’s legal department has consented to release selected details of further findings of the study. It identified a school netball star in York, UK, and a real-estate agent in Orlando, Florida, who both appear to have been Charlemagne, apparently on a time-sharing basis. Joel R (London) has found out to his dismay that he’s a “Firstie”, with no previous lives. As such he will be blamed for anything going wrong with his future selves. Elias Z, a dentist of Pasadena, California, was previously a particularly well-karmaed fruit bat named eeeEEeeee-EE-Eei in Madagascar, 1914-21 (estimated).
Intense competition for Charlemagnitude will of course raise prices when, as InMyTime expects, a market in reincarnation is opened. How well the fruit bat option will sell is less obvious.
A FEW years ago the music industry came up with a new idea. “Unplugged” concerts give artists the chance to show they really can sing by performing live without amplification. So Feedback jumped at the chance of seeing the UK’s pop diva and self-styled bad girl Charlotte Church at an event held by cellphone giant Orange in a small London club. The invite promised an “exclusive live and unplugged concert”.
After nearly two hours wait the singer came on stage with a heavily amplified band of guitar, electric bass, electric keyboard and a drum kit fit for an octopus. She sang four songs, shouting very close into a microphone, which produced loud and distorted sound. The next day Orange sent out a press release confirming that “last night, Charlotte Church performed an exclusive unplugged set to celebrate the launch of Orange Broadband”.
Presumably if you are as huge as Orange, it is okay to rewrite history.
THE pack of Orikaso Flatworld Picnicware that Paul Warden bought announced that it was “Durable, Easy to Clean, Space Saving, Lighter than Titanium”.
“Well…er…yes,” says Warden. “It’s made of plastic.”
FINALLY, our piece about the likely number of deities in the universe, in which we came up with the answer zero (22 July), produced a huge response, so much so that we don’t have enough space to do it justice here. If you want to see how the argument develops, you can do so in this week’s Letters section on www.newscientist.com under the title “How many gods are there?”.
