Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Holy breadsticks
IDLY studying a packet of Sainsbury’s grissini breadsticks, Chris McManus noted with approval that they were “Torinesi grissini”, so presumably from Turin. But the small print on the back says “Produced in Italy (incl. Vatican City)”.
“Doesn’t that suddenly transform both the Vatican and these humble breadsticks?” Chris observes. “Who would have thought that bakers toil at the back of St Peter’s, hand-rolling grissini?” Then: “Are these, perhaps, Holy Grissini?”
Advertisement
Sainsbury’s uses the slogan “Taste the Difference”. Surely, Chris, we should be able to tell whether the grissini are holy.
Surely some mistake? A press release from the University of Alberta announces: “U Alberta teams with citizen researchers 370 light years from Earth”
Instant phone response
OUR mention of a colleague receiving a phone call helpfully labelled as originating from “Marketing Fraud” (18 May) prompts Steve Swift to tell how he puzzled a caller by picking up the phone and instantly telling her she had the wrong number.
It turned out that she had called him before, seeking a nearby shop whose telephone number differs from Steve’s only in swapping two digits. Steve saved her number, labelled “Wrong Number”, to his phone’s memory – so when she called again he was immediately able to put her right.
However, our colleague insists he doesn’t know how to program his landline phone to associate names with numbers. So the “Marketing Fraud” label must have come from the caller or some intermediate service – unless, our colleague suggests, “somebody at the phone company was messing with them”.
Appealing to the gullible
READER Tony Green has another idea on why callers might identify themselves as “Marketing Fraud”. Might this be yet more support for the theory put forward by Cormac Hurley in his paper “Why do Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria?” – namely that would-be fraudsters want to hear only from the truly, deeply gullible (13 April, and 21 July 2012)?
Blinding with “digibabble”
BLINDING with pseudoscience is a sure-fire way to get a few confused souls to part with their cash, as most Feedback columns attest. Chris Mullard alerts us to a sub-genre which we shall call “digibabble”.
The site purveys products that purport to boost a car’s performance by dealing with electromagnetic interference to engine control units (ECUs). “Your engine ECU functions in a similar way to how a home computer downloads data from the Internet,” the site . “Noise and error correction protocols can drop speed to as little as 300 cycles per second.”
Eh? It’s not clear what’s inside the “poured stone concrete material” encasing a Shakti Electromagnetic Stabilizer, though hints at crystals. It’s a snip at $230, we’re sure.
Chris Two Metres calls
SMARTPHONES are wonderful things. Rowland Coles shortens people’s names and uses surname initials when he stores a number on his, adding “m” for mobile and “h” for home number. Stupid phones also allow that – but only a smart one announces the caller’s shortened name in an authoritative voice that reminds him of a Pathé newsreel film.
One friend with a second mobile number, tagged “Chris 2m”, gets announced as “Chris Two Metres”, and the name has stuck in the outside world. Keith Wells’s entry, “KW home”, comes booming out as “Kilowatt Home”. Have any other readers encountered hardware that tries this hard to understand?
Hot air from water
THERE’S a mug born every minute, as the British saying has it. But we’re not sure whether the proprietors of were the mugs or the muggers.
Their website has disappeared since Andy Bebbington’s eye was caught by their offer of kits that would use power from your car’s battery to generate hydrogen and oxygen from water, then feed a mixture of the two gases into the air intake.
Andy’s brother Perry writes: “As far as I can see this is an elaborate perpetual-motion machine. The only thing it can do is increase fuel consumption.” The website , but had a suspicious lack of the spurious science we expect from scammers.
The business appeared to be based in a residence in an unprepossessing area of London. Did the owners think better of their trade, or is there another tale here?
Skeuomorph conundrum
FINALLY. Feedback has long been fascinated with anachronistic representations for technology, such as a picture of a bookshelf in an ebooks app. These, we discovered, may be called skeuomorphs (9 September 2011).
So what, Serge Rosenberg wants to know, is the name of the class of object shown in the photo he sends. It is an old-fashioned phone that faithfully reproduces the landline handset icon found on the buttons you jab at to “pick up” or “put down” a call on a cellphone. So what do you call something real that is based on a skeuomorph? Might it be an antiskeuomorph? Or should we just call it “Art”?