FRUITLOOPERY alert! Fruitloopery alert! Yes, it’s the q-word again, and it’s popping up all over the place. Take the offered by a company called Vibrancy Inc. A reader who wishes to be known only as Woodrow recommends to us the correspondence between the author of the Found on Craig’s List blog and a Vibrancy Inc representative who sparked considerable interest among us journalists by claiming: “I can design a protocol specifically for writer’s block.”
How does it work? As you can read at , “it sends out 10,000 beneficial homeopathic frequencies”. This must be a good thing, because apparently “the body has an incredible intelligence and will absorb what it needs”.
Spectrographers might be even more surprised by the next bit. “If the frequency of (for example) vitamin C doesn’t come back,” the Vibrancy Inc person claims, “we know the body has absorbed this energy.” And that, they conclude, would mean the body “is deficient in this nutrient”.
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Conventional, mundane, unimaginatively rational chemistry would humbly suggest the opposite. Vitamin C does indeed have characteristic electromagnetic frequencies. The more of it there is, the more of them it absorbs. If they don’t “come back” from the body, that would suggest it’s actually chock-full of the vitamin.
But we are not, of course, dealing with boring old electromagnetic radiation (boo! hiss! “radiation”!) here. Further enquiry led our blogger to , which offers remote therapy sessions: “After obtaining and inputting specific information that we gather from you… we can connect with you vibrationally, on what we call a ubspace’ level.”
Vibrancy Inc appears, however, not to rely on this amazing breakthrough in cosmology when it comes to customers transmitting the $180 charge for the initial 2-hour remote session. Rather, it relies on tedious, old-fashioned electromagnetic PayPal.
“Several readers have noted with surprise that the Zome construction kit sold by “offers the ability for kids to expand their objects in up to 61 different dimensions”
THE q-word in “quantum biofeedback” is, of course, entirely free of meaning. We can only assume it has been tacked on there by somebody who hoped it would sound impressive. The same is true of the Organic Pharmacy’s £150 Quantum Health Assessment, which involves a “diagnostic” scanning with a Quantum QXCI machine. The initials here stand for Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, so the embedded quantums are really stacking up – all of them meaning absolutely nothing.
Queries to a famous web search engine reveal that the QXCI machine was last year by the quackbusting British journalist Ben Goldacre in his “Bad science” column in The Guardian newspaper. This was after The Daily Telegraph had run an article appearing to endorse the machine and the claims made for it.
Sadly, it seems Goldacre’s comments have not cut any ice with the powers that be at the Telegraph group. As late as last month, Organic Pharmacy was still advertising the “quantum” machine in the pages of The Sunday Telegraph Stella magazine (26 April), which is where Feedback reader Andrew Brightwell saw it and told us about it.
Pub closes “smoking research centre”
FIRST it was Japanese fishermen hunting whales for “scientific research”. Now a pub in the north of England has been allowing drinkers to get round the UK’s smoking ban in a room designated as a “smoking research centre”.
According to a , the Cutting Edge pub in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, believed it had discovered a loophole in English smoking laws that allowed people to smoke on the premises so long as they filled in a questionnaire on their smoking habits before sitting down for a drink and a cigarette in the “centre”.
Sadly, that this could only apply within research institutions – which the Cutting Edge is “clearly not”. The pub has therefore had to close down its smoking room.
THE letter that Jim Franks received from , a branch of the UK government, told him: “We have looked at your Pension Credit again and made an automated decision using the details we currently hold to set a new assessed income period from 5 July 2009 to 28 February 1852.” With commendable determination to put first things first, rather than respond to The Pension Service and ask what on earth it was talking about, Jim promptly scanned in the letter and sent a copy to Feedback.
READER Paul Spicker draws our attention to a recent advertisement in The Times, London, for “5 star Luxury European River Cruises” on which “Your room also includes… a 6 × 2.5 foot high window that does not go below the water line even when passing under low bridges.”
FINALLY, there seemed to be something wrong with the description Mike Hogan spotted on a shelf of cold meats at his local Asda store. “Asda Germ Selection” announced the label. Studying the products more closely, Mike noted that those near the offending label all came from Germany. The realisation that an unfortunate truncation had taken place came as something of a relief.