2019 has been quite a year, hasn’t it? It’s had everything – catastrophic climate change, impeachment proceedings, even the occasional bout of political drama in the UK. Throughout it all, as the arrow of time shot remorselessly forward, one thing didn’t change: the world remained as weird a place as ever.
As we leave the crematorium of one year for the birthing ward of another, Feedback longs to cast one last look over our shoulder at the year that was the year that this year was. And what better way to do so than by bestowing our very own awards, the inaugural Feedbys. Think of them as recognition of the pinnacles of absurdity recorded in our past revolution around the sun.
Artificial stupidity
We begin with the most highly coveted of these awards, the Skynet Memorial Feedby for Human-Robot Interaction. Robots and sundry other possessors of artificial intelligence littered our pages in 2019, often with some ill-advised human not far behind.
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In Kyoto, Japan, a $1 million robot began work as a Buddhist priest, and tiny automated chaperones were used to accompany potential couples on their first dates. Russian television appeared to show an equally impressive display of robotics early in the year, until news got out that it was actually a human in a costume.
Not only were humans mistaken for robots in 2019, robots were also mistaken for humans – though not necessarily in ways that would set off Turing test alarms. In April, Feedback reported on an emergency call made by a woman in Oregon who was alarmed at noises inside her home. Police promptly arrived at the residence, bursting inside to discover an autonomous Roomba vacuum cleaner diligently performing its allotted task. In a characteristically generous gesture, Feedback awards the Skynet Memorial Feedby to everyone involved in this surreal tableau: the police, the homeowner and, last but not least, the Roomba.
Animal spirits
The other great pillar of preposterousness on which 2019 rested concerned the affairs of animals. There was sad news when Trevor, the world’s loneliest duck, was murdered on the remote Pacific island of Niue by a passing dog. The canine might have had a brief moment of triumph, but cosmic justice was served on all its kind a month later when the state of Kentucky officially banned dogs from becoming welders.
Tragedy also befell a Japanese slug that electrocuted itself in a device that powered the local train system. Dozens of trains were left out of order and thousands of commuters rendered unwillingly sluggish themselves.
However, for demonstrating power out of proportion to its size, no animal could match Darwin’s finch, which we learned generates 320 times more force with its bite, pound for pound, than a T. rex . This remarkable strength, no doubt aided by the finch’s big-name sponsorship deal and heavyweight PR team, earns it Feedback’s Animal Spirits award for 2019.
Quality flimflamology
As usual, our inbox overflowed with the myriad ways in which the public’s gullibility was being exploited. There were some real gems this year, and we aren’t just talking about “bewater”, a brand with an idiosyncratic aversion to capital letters, which decorates its water bottles with semi-precious stones in the hope of purifying the contents with their vibrational energy.
Similarly ludicrous was the Ultimate Smart Shirt 3.0, whose awe-inspiring multifunctionality promised to make it even more useful than Batman’s utility belt. It was said not only to reflect ultraviolet radiation, but also to emit infrared radiation and look fantastic in the visible spectrum.
But Feedback’s award for Flimflamology Beyond Compare goes to the inventors of quantum speed-reading, a technique designed to let you absorb the contents of an entire book in seconds. The word quantum seemed to have fallen out of favour among purveyors of woo-woo of late, so we feel strangely reassured to discover it is still actively misleading punters. May there be more such old-fashioned nonsense next year.
Going cold turkey
And finally, for what is absolutely guaranteed to be the last time in 2019, we break our pledge not to mention nominative determinism in order to bestow our Feedby for Best Supporting Surname. We nearly called them the Oscars, but then we realised that naming an object after a person went against the spirit of what we were trying to achieve. Also, the legal fees would have been extortionate.
It has been quite a year for people with apt names: we had a sheep-breeding Nicola Lambe and multiple nominations for a whisky-brewing Jim Beveridge. Coastal researcher Ruth Reef gets an honourable mention, as does the campaigner for more spacious lavatory seats Neil Longbottom. But the undisputed winner, narrowly beating the urologist Nicholas Burns-Cox, is former US National Security Agency employee John Sipher.
Thank you to everyone who enabled our addiction in 2019, but we absolutely must put our foot down and insist that 2020 will be a year free of nominative determinism. We are counting on you all to hold us to it.
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