High-tech herbs on an astral plane
FEEDBACK’S quest to classify fruitloop “remedies” appears to have uncovered a new genus: high-tech plants. Why market a boring old herbal remedy containing something related to the weed milk-vetch when you can squint sideways at the Linnaean name of its family of plants, , ignore the fact that “astragalus” is Ancient Greek for “ankle bone”, and call it ““? (Feedback assumes, and we do hope we are correct, that the “rare astragalus extract” involved is not from another member of the family, locoweed, so named because it sends livestock crazy.)
It’s not the name that is high-tech, however, but what claims Astral Fruit can do. It supposedly activates an enzyme that rebuilds your telomeres – the strands of DNA that cap the ends of your chromosomes. These get shorter as you get older. So, it would seem, keeping them long must keep you young – mustn’t it? And that would be well worth paying $84.95 a month for – wouldn’t it?
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We just have to hope that telomere trimming does not turn out – contrary to the hopes of some researchers into ageing – to be evolution’s way of getting rid of pre-cancerous cells, as some .
Meanwhile, we confidently predict that this fruitloop high-tech plant family will expand its niche. Indeed, given the website’s decision to name itself “RevGenetics”, we even predict that the next step could be the appearance of a sub-family of genetically enhanced, high-tech, all-natural herb remedies. Won’t that be exciting?
“Robert Riden welcomes A. R. George’s “masterly” edit of The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, but wonders if the NZ$125,547,710,814 asked for it on isn’t “somewhat extravagant”
The tale of Terry’s terriers
EVERY few days Feedback receives an email from someone called “Terry” inquiring about placing a classified advert. 51¶ŻÂţ of course welcomes adverts, even if mis-addressed. But why, we wondered, would someone want to use this magazine’s highly focused weekly services to publicise an offer to give away “two Yorkshire” (terriers) in “tomorrow’s edition”? Our suspicions vis-Ă -vis scam or spam were reinforced by receiving similar requests on our home computer.
So we searched and discovered that “Terry” uses the address cravendunnillcoltd@gmail.com and, besides emailing 51¶ŻÂţ, he has placed dozens of ads on websites in Australia, Canada and the US, which on the face of it suggests the dogs in question have a penchant for travel.
The email address also appears on lists of alleged “advance fee” scams such as Joe Wein’s “domain blacklist” at . But if it is indeed a scam, we are still left wondering how it works.
Meanwhile, our hearts go out to , makers of fine ceramic tiles who have nothing to do with Terry’s Yorkshire terriers and no doubt rue the day Terry chose an email address so similar to their own.
WHEN Vivian Unger sent a work of fiction to Asimov’s Science Fiction (ASF) magazine, using their online submission form, a page came up thanking her, giving her a tracking number and telling her: “At present, our average response time is five weeks with a range covering five weeks to three months.”
This means, Vivian deduced, that their average response time is also their fastest response time. Could this be possible, even for a science fiction magazine accustomed to imagining things currently believed to be impossible, such as faster-than-light warp drives?
Vivian speculates that it may be a question of rounding. If ASF never responds to submissions in less than five weeks, but takes three months to respond to one out of every 1000 submissions, the average submission would be 35.049 days, or close enough to five weeks.
But perhaps this is being too fanciful. Only ASF can explain.
Relieving the symptoms of everyday life
READER Philip Woolfe was struck by this product description on the website of the UK pharmacy chain Boots: “Boots St John’s Wort is becoming increasingly popular in helping to relieve some of the symptoms associated with everyday life.”
Peter wonders what symptoms they are referring to. Do they include breathing, for example? Eating? Consciousness? Going to the toilet?
Feedback wonders if they would recommend cyanide as an alternative for those who want to relieve all the symptoms, not just some of them.
In an emergency, get on all fours
FINALLY, the fire procedures manual at Lynda Hopkins’s place of work says that in the event of fire, staff should “exit the building horizontally”.
She thinks this may be a reference to the fact that there are no stairs for staff to navigate, rather than a recommendation that they exit on all fours.
“Personally,” she adds, “should a fire break out I intend to leave vertically – with speed.”
