HER wish is for world peace and she wants to work with PDAs or other small, cute computers. Yes, you鈥檝e guessed it, she is a Miss Digital World contestant.
Digital artists, advertising agencies and video-game programmers from around the world have been asked to submit a design of their perfect woman to , complete with date of birth and body measurements.
The competition rules give us the same uneasy sense of exaggerated wholesomeness colliding with sleaze as the boring old real version: 鈥淸Contestants] must never have taken part, not even as extras or cameos, in any kind of pornographic film or show鈥or have made statements鈥� in any way out of tune with the moral spirit of the competition.鈥�
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And, given the limitless possibilities of the medium, we can鈥檛 help finding the selection criteria not just speciesist but, well, real-ist. But may the best spokesentity for nonhumanity win.
THANKS to the many readers who pointed out that any website listing Googlewhackblatts, those single words that produce exactly one response from the eponymous search engine, would instantly destroy the words鈥� uniqueness (see Letters, 31 July, p 25). As Ivan Probert puts it, the challenge of finding new words would be entirely pointless, as would the website itself, until such time as it closed, when there would again be place for it.
Fortunately, Feedback has two answers for anyone volunteering to build such a site. The first involves ways of preventing Google from indexing a word that appears on the site. Unfortunately, simply presenting pictures of words would be unfair to blind users, and the other ways are deeply geeky. Reader Jose M. Facelli suggests an easy solution: the site administrator should immediately delete all new entries, at which time they once more become eligible and can be added again.
This leads us to a second solution which at last provides a fully logical use for the deeply hated hypertext Blink tag that makes text on a website flash on and off as you look at it.
Yes, while a word is shown it鈥檚 not a googlewhackblatt, and while it isn鈥檛 it is. Perfect.
ANOTHER day, another day out for Feedback, this time to the Farnborough Air Show in Hampshire, UK, scented delightfully with aviation kerosene. None of the big cheeses from the space industry had anything to announce. You can get a flavour of the occasion from the wonderfully content-free statement by Jean-Jacques Dordain, director-general of the European Space Agency, describing its new science programme: 鈥淲e are working on a robust yet flexible scenario that can take into account an evolving international context.鈥�
IN Julie Freeman鈥檚 local Asda supermarket, a large poster behind the cooked-chicken counter exhorted her to 鈥淭ry our tasty chicken flavoured chicken鈥�. Finding herself wondering what other flavours the chicken came in, she became distracted and unthinkingly purchased some 鈥淏acon flavoured turkey rashers鈥� at the chilled food section.
Reeling from this profusion of meat-flavoured meat, she wondered what she would come across next. Carrot flavoured onions? Banana flavoured pineapples?
MEANWHILE, Tom Baring encountered an altogether different problem when he was shopping. He noticed that Quaker sells instant oatmeal in several varieties, including 鈥淩egular Flavour鈥�. Not to be outdone, Colgate offers 鈥淕reat Regular Flavour鈥� toothpaste. Baring bought both, and was greatly relieved to find that Great Regular Flavour tastes quite different from Regular Flavour.
RICHARD HOPTROFF writes to tell us that he recently overheard a colleague saying that he had seen and was impressed by 鈥淧fizer鈥檚 sandwich plant鈥�. What was this, Hoptroff wondered. Was the drug firm branching out into new areas of research into genetically modified crops? Might the likes of Pret-a-Manger be headed out of business?
Alas, no. The colleague was talking about Pfizer鈥檚 factory in Sandwich, Kent.
FINALLY, don鈥檛 forget to send in your entries to our summer competition. Now that he has sorted out the black hole information paradox, what should Stephen Hawking do next?
Any question profound enough to merit the great man鈥檚 attention must be expressed as one sentence in the plainest of English.
The winning entries will be chosen on the basis of their wit, originality and contribution to our understanding of the universe (and beyond). All entries must reach us by Monday 30 August. The five winners will be announced in the 11 September issue and, thanks to the generosity of Random House, will each receive a copy of The Universe in a Nutshell by 鈥� who else 鈥� Stephen Hawking. The Editor鈥檚 decision is final.
According to the Shropshire Star website last month, 鈥淭he magical surroundings of a historic Shropshire park were the setting for the launch of a new guide showing tourists the real story of mythical King Arthur鈥�