Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Men make monthly mistakes
PUBLICIST Diana Ziskin writes to alert us that âThe creators of MyPeriod Tracker App are five typical guys who were tired of the drama, discourse and sometimes absurd fights they would come home to with their wives and girlfriends when they had no idea it was âthat time of the monthâ.â
An attached advert for the phone app, in which women can share their cycle with their partners so that âyour relationship can once again run more smoothly⊠yes, even during that week!â, has the guys saying that it âwas borne [sic] out of our need for survival and to better understand and be able to support our wivesâ. Some readers may visualise a pause after âsurvivalâ, followed by the blenching of a man who realises he had better backtrack, entirely unconvincing though this effort is.
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Given the date of this issue of 51¶ŻÂț, a curious Feedback wonders how well one of these would go down as a Valentineâs Day gift.
Hunting through his cupboard, Ian Wells found . He wonders what the boredom or terror editions do. Weâre boggled by âCola Bottlesâ and âStrawberry Lacesâ scents
A whaleâs hall of fame
LONDONâS Natural History Museum attracted a great deal of publicity in January for its announcement that it will replace the iconic copy of a Diplodocus skeleton in its entrance hall with a real blue whale skeleton. As Susan Parker observed on the day of the announcement, âDinosaur fans everywhere will be weeping into their cornflakes.â And they did, indeed lobbying to .
But âthe important thingâ, as Susan puts it, âis that this will give a proper perspective on the standardised blue-whale unit of measurement â whereas we donât tend to talk about multiples or fractions of a Diplodocus.â Not yet, we donât. Feedbackâs mailbag quivers in expectation.
Safe soccer standard
PERHAPS the above-mentioned cetacean should instead be moved to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France to serve as the Standard Blue Whale?
On a related topic, Feedback was discussing with friends the problem of using the football pitch as a unit of area owing to the variation between pitches (25 October 2014). As a sportophobe, we found ourselves in the unusual position of agreeing with Manchester City fans in proposing that the Manchester United pitch be made the standard, moved to Paris and kept under glass in a vacuum.
While a whale waits
CONFUSINGLY, Jack Harrison reports a way to combine whales and football into a measure of time. He spotted a poster in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull that announces: âSperm whale â can dive to over 1000 metres and stay underwater for the duration of a football matchâ.
On the buses
COINCIDENTALLY, we think, several readers wrote at the end of January to ask: âwhatever happened to the double-decker bus?â This, as Richard King observes, âwas the standard unit of weight when I was youngâ. The âRoutemasterâ bus, now banished to London heritage status, has a mass of 7.47 tonnes â or, in the new non-metrocentric international units, 1.5 African elephants.
Rob Macfie thus questions the use of the outdated unit by Sheffield City Councillor Jayne Dunn, who proudly that about 188 double-decker buses of salt had been spread to de-ice that cityâs roads.
Alex MacDonald and Richard Bamborough both noted that new nuclear waste vaults at Dounreay in Scotland were in the Daily Record as being âequivalent in volume to between 370 and 450 double-decker busesâ. Feedback wonders whose interests are served by using a superseded unit of volume.
Double-deck decibel distress
MORE disturbingly, Alex MacDonald also forwarded from the Aberdeen Press and Journal, also in Scotland, that a soundproof building at the Lossiemouth Air Force base âwould be able to silence the fightersâ twin engines â which are the same as 32 double-decker busesâ. Feedback has enough trouble comparing decibel values given plainly: this really makes our head hurt.
Stop in the middle of nowhere
SPEAKING of buses, Sofia Graves writes: âWhen you travel on the bus from Majorca airport into the city, the first stop is announced as âJoan Maragall Street â Virtualâ.â She hasnât âhad the guts to explore what would happen if I got off at a virtual stopâ.
If she got off, would she be able to bypass the 8-kilometre journey to Joan Maragall Street â Real?
The search for poetry
FINALLY, we were a little piqued by the feature on writing poetry in computer code (27 December 2014, p 51). Feedback was rhyming in the Pascal language a quarter century ago.
Anne Sproule does much better by sending poems apparently produced by computer code. The title of each poem is a word that you enter into a search engine: the body is the suggestions it provides you, at that moment, on what you might be looking for. Anne gives two examples:
THIS: This is the end / This American Life / This is why I am broke / This is 40 / This means war!
WHY: Why is the sky blue? / Why am I so tired? / Why do we dream? / Why do dogs eat grass? / Why am I always so tired?
