AN ADVERT is currently running on British television for a product aimed at the 1 in 10 men 鈥渙ver a certain age鈥� who suffer from erectile dysfunction. For obvious reasons the advertising agency has decided to go for allegory when demonstrating the success of the product: the ad shows a couple strolling happily, hand in hand, through a field of barley.
What John Reade wants to know is: is it only the weed scientists and agronomists among the viewers who noticed how weedy the crop is? And is it pure coincidence that the weed is wild oats?
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ACCESSORIES for the iPod have to be stylish, but do they have to incorporate the latest technology? Certainly the iPod amplifier manufactured by N&S Valveworks of Saitama, Japan, doesn鈥檛. It uses old-fashioned valves, or vacuum tubes, the electronic dinosaurs that were supposed to have gone extinct at the dawn of the transistor age.
Of course, many audiophiles still hold a torch for valve amplifiers 鈥� but coupling them up with an iPod? The juxtaposition seems so unlikely that one reviewer for IEEE Spectrum magazine called the amp 鈥渁s oddly conceived a product as I鈥檝e ever encountered in more than 20 years of audio reviewing鈥�. However, he agrees that the music sounds good 鈥� as long as you start with a higher-fidelity sound source than the compressed digital sound from an iPod.
FURTHER to our speculation about spam loops (Feedback, 16 July), here鈥檚 a variant. Most email users are sadly accustomed to receiving messages from virus warning systems on servers that they have never emailed anything to, telling them that they have sent a virus. Someone they know has been infected with a virus, which has borrowed their identity from that careless person鈥檚 address list鈥�
Seranne Howis, however, was a bit startled to discover recently that she had been spammed by herself. Apparently, she had some great stock options for sale.
TALKING of spam, Paul Brown has been reading the randomly generated text that some spammers use in an attempt to convince filter programs that their messages are original compositions. He has spared us the sordid 鈥減ayload鈥�, but is really rather impressed by this example: 鈥淏lack holes are where God divided by zero / Small to greater matters must give way / Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought / Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.鈥�
THIS week鈥檚 example of RAS syndrome (redundant acronym鈥�) has been staring all geeks in the face for nearly a decade: CSS style sheets, used to define the colours, type style and so on of web pages. CSS stands for 鈥渃ascading style sheets鈥�, a double redundancy that is painfully appropriate to the way they work.
AND another surprising paper title. Sue Low reports that she found an article in the American Journal of Ophthalmology (vol 137, p 379), entitled 鈥淢icrowave-superheated Vics vapo rub: An ocular public health danger鈥�.
Vicks, incidentally, is spelled correctly in the body of the article but wrongly in the title.
IT鈥橲 not really a GoogleAnything, but it鈥檚 still intriguing 鈥� and not only if you are a computational linguist like Peet Morris. Reading a review of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman, Morris was intrigued by reference to Feynman鈥檚 鈥渟econd, disastrous marriage to a woman who allegedly once told him 鈥榮ome old bore called, but I sent him away鈥� when Niels Bohr tried to visit Feynman鈥︹��.
So Morris looked up 鈥渟ome old bore called, but I sent him away鈥� on a well-known internet search engine. Not only did this produce just one hit 鈥� the review Morris was reading 鈥� but so did the phrase 鈥渟ome old bore called鈥�.
Maybe we鈥檙e unlucky, but given our experience of bores, their age distribution and their propensity to call, this seems astonishing. What should we call a phrase that intuition says should be common but is in fact, due to the amazing combinatorial properties of language, scarce? Well, let鈥檚 call it exactly what it is: a nearly clich茅. Four words or fewer; must make sense; we鈥檙e going to regret this鈥�
鈥淚nstruction label on IKEA鈥檚 Bryt pendulum clock: 鈥淭ime stops when the pendulum is pulled鈥濃��
ATTACHED to the riding hat that Claire Adams bought in Australia was a label saying 鈥淜eep out of direct sunlight.鈥� How she is supposed to do that while cantering through the outback, she does not know.
FINALLY Feedback鈥檚 Department of Unusual Units is pleased to announce another entry to our expanding collection. An upgraded flood barrier on a river in south-east England 鈥渟aved hundreds of homes from flooding during October 2000, when flows down the Medway were 13 times the average鈥�, reports the BBC website 鈥� 鈥渆qual to 1000 baths full of water passing every second鈥�. The kilobath is of course also equal to one bath filling in a millisecond, which would be handier, if noisier.