VARIOUS websites promise to track down your old schoolmates and friends so you can get in touch. But what about the ones you don鈥檛 want to encounter again, like unsavoury former relatives by marriage, or the class thug expelled by the school at age 16 to your great relief? Many US states now have websites that can search their past and present prison populations to see if your former acquaintances ended up in the deep trouble you thought they richly deserved.
鈥淕ood to see Sainsbury鈥檚 supermarket encouraging customer autonomy. E. S. Violett alerts us to the cooking guidelines on a packet of the store鈥檚 cod fillets: 鈥淐ook any way you choose鈥濃��
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A colleague found such a facility at , and in just a few minutes he was looking at a mugshot and prison rap sheet for a kid he remembered from school as a budding gangster. Time, says our colleague, has mercifully blurred his memory of this man鈥檚 many adolescent misdeeds other than his habit of walking up to other kids and punching them, but judging by the mugshot the years have been far less kind to his own face.
A few more clicks found the brother of a cousin鈥檚 ex-husband who the family thought had disappeared after a disagreement with other denizens of the New Orleans underworld. It turned out that he survived that incident, only to find a new home in a New York jail.
POP-UP web advertisements have recently been offering Feedback 鈥渟ilent ringtones鈥� for our mobile phone. Eh? What good would that be?
Of course, we would never click a link in a pop-up ad and we don鈥檛 recommend that you do either. But after a little FWSEing (see below) we discover that it鈥檚 that rare thing 鈥� a product Feedback really rather approves of. Various enterprises are offering ringtones at 16 kilohertz and above. Older people, whose frequency response is dropping off, cannot hear them, but teenagers can. Feedback is not a teenager and thinks this is a great idea.
SO WHAT鈥橲 this 鈥淔WSEing鈥�, you ask? Lawyers for a famous web search engine (FWSE) beginning with G have been sending out letters to remind publications that we must not use their trademarked name as a verb, lest we 鈥渄ilute鈥� it and turn it into an ordinary English word that nobody can sue over. So we shan鈥檛. 鈥淔oosieing鈥� it is from now on. I FWSE, thou FWSEest, she, he or it FWSEies鈥�
HERE鈥橲 a reader with an unusual field of interest. Gus McNaughton likes to read the words at the top of each page in a dictionary 鈥� those that tell you the first and the last words to be found on the page. These pairings can be quite bizarre, though he says the effect is only achieved when they are linked by a hyphen. It is lost when, as is more usual, the words are printed separately.
The most prolific source of interesting pairings is, somewhat to McNaughton鈥檚 surprise, the Collins Paperback Spanish Dictionary, which contains such interesting concepts as 鈥渓ikeable-lingerie鈥�, 鈥渉ashish-havoc鈥�, 鈥渢hick-skinned-thought鈥�, 鈥渟wimming-trunks-syntax error鈥�, 鈥渞adioactive-raisin鈥�, 鈥渜uizzical-radio鈥�, 鈥渂ody language-booby trap鈥�.
THE Red Cross in Melbourne, Australia, is advertising for donors under the slogan 鈥�80 per cent of the people who see this ad will need blood in their lifetime鈥�. Ken Norling wants to know who the other 20 per cent are.
Less than a thousandth of the price
READERS hoping to buy a bottle of Roman茅e-Conti Domaine de la Roman茅e-Conti from Berry Bros & Rudd will be disappointed, partly because it costs 拢6100 (yes, really) a bottle, and more particularly because according to the website, there is 鈥渘o more stock available鈥�.
But never mind. If you hit the 鈥渇ind similar鈥� button, you will be directed to two other BBR wines. One of these costs 拢4.50 a bottle and the other 拢4.95. John Ingram, who discovered this, wonders exactly what the word 鈥渟imilar鈥� means here.
HE DOESN鈥橳 say why, but reader Tony Budd typed 鈥渟olar system controller鈥� into Google. He was disturbed to be taken immediately to the website of Worcester-Bosch, a manufacturer of central-heating systems. How did this company acquire such awesome power 鈥� and can we trust it to use that power wisely?
OUR favourite paper titles this week 鈥� spotted by our colleague Jeff Hecht and reader Chris Draper 鈥� are, from the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (vol 19, p 1437), 鈥淗eritability and fitness-related consequences of squid personality traits鈥�, and, from Biological Conservation (vol 124, p 27), 鈥淓ffectiveness of supplemental stockings for the endangered woodrat鈥�.
FINALLY, a recent Australian Water Association newsletter seen by Rosemary Barnes contains this charmingly predictable misspelling: 鈥淭he New South Wales Irrigators Council has delivered a damming report on the progress of water reform under the National Water Initiative.鈥�