Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Taylor-made odds
What were the chances that Feedback would kick off 2020 with a story about probability? No, scratch that 鈥� what were the chances that Feedback would kick off 2020 with a joke about probability inspired by a story about probability? Who cares, right? When it comes to statistics, the only numbers anyone cares about are the ones that win you the lottery. Or at least that鈥檚 certainly true for John Cabral of Maryland, who has hit the jackpot not once but twice.
What could account for this outrageous stroke of good fortune? None other than the pop sensation Taylor Swift, . On the day of his first victory, he was working at one of Swift鈥檚 concerts, helping her get to a stage on the Potomac river by boat. And his second win? Well, get this 鈥� it came two days before she picked up six gongs at the American Music Awards. 鈥淎 coincidence?鈥� Feedback breathlessly asks itself. 鈥淵es,鈥� we answer, having recovered our puff, 鈥渁nd not an altogether surprising one at that.鈥�
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This art is bananas
Science and art are two separate cultures, said the novelist C. P. Snow, lamenting how few artists had ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics compared with how many scientists knew Shakespeare. He dreamed of a world where everybody took equal interest in both, which sounds great in principle, but terrible if you have standing tickets at London鈥檚 Globe theatre for a 3-hour lecture on entropy. Things are marginally better today, if only because nobody in either culture has heard of C. P. Snow, and so this tiresome debate has quietly heat-deathed itself into oblivion.
A renewal of hostilities between the cultures recently caught Feedback鈥檚 attention, however, and well and truly got our dander up. A few weeks ago, artist Maurizio Cattelan took the world by storm by taping a single banana to a wall at the Art Basel show in Miami Beach, Florida, and , called Comedian, for $120,000. As art largely consists of communication by means other than direct speech, the resulting wall-to-banana-flavoured-wall coverage was undoubtedly a success.
To wit, the soon entered the debate. As an institution of higher learning devoted almost exclusively to science and engineering, Imperial is often touted as the UK鈥檚 answer to MIT 鈥� though maybe if people took more interest in the humanities, Feedback ponders, they would realise MIT isn鈥檛 a question. In a series of tweets broadly dismissive of artistic endeavour, it posted pictures of bananas affixed to various on-campus surfaces with the message 鈥渟pot the art鈥�.
Given that the original banana was able to defy the laws of gravity with the help of highly engineered material adhesives, we disagree with Imperial鈥檚 assessment. If anything, the original work was science. Stick that in Magritte鈥檚 pipe and smoke it.
Art of darkness
More arty news courtesy of Madrid, where the Prado Museum has collaborated with conservation group WWF to imagine in a world where global temperatures had risen by 1.5掳C. The results are not an improvement. An enormous oil painting of Philip IV of Spain on horseback by Diego Vel谩zquez, for example, now shows the king and his steed going for a swim.
As gimmicks go, it has merit. Perhaps a similar overhaul is necessary to bring great works of literature in line with the apocalyptic future. In a revamped Moby-Dick, for example, Captain Ahab鈥檚 cetacean nemesis would have long since choked to death on microplastic filaments. War and Peace would find Napoleon mopping his sweaty brow in the balmy Russian winter, having conquered the snow-free steppes with little difficulty. And in an updated Northern Lights, Lyra travels north to find the once-mighty armoured bears drifting listlessly on ice floes. C. P. Snow would surely approve 鈥� or should that be C. P. Slush?
Ten-microgallon hat
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for readers who have been led astray on such matters, is not a movie about pigeons. It is a movie about cowboys 鈥� that is to say, misogynistic, murdering, rootin鈥�-tootin鈥� gunmen who meander about the 19th-century American Wild West in search of a credit sequence. It takes them a while to find it, but lordy are you relieved when they do.
It would probably have aged better had it been about pigeons, which is why, to make an abrupt segue, Feedback鈥檚 interest was piqued by news out of Las Vegas, Nevada, that a trio of pigeons were wearing cowboy hats.
The story gets more depressing the more you find out. It seems that some ornithological milliner glued the aforementioned hats to the aforementioned pigeons, perhaps to coincide with the National Finals Rodeo taking place in the same state.
But perhaps things aren鈥檛 as bad as they seem. Charles Walcott, an ornithologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, he wasn鈥檛 concerned for the birds鈥� welfare. 鈥淭hey look like happy pigeons to me,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t is hard to know, of course, because they will not talk to us.鈥� Looks like we鈥檝e got ourselves an avian stand-off.
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