VIBRATIONAL energies are, we suggested back on 17 December 2005, sure-fire indicators that texts mentioning them are fruit-loopery deluxe. We now add to our trigger list all combinations of “subtle”, “energy”, “quantum” and “physics”. Especially “German subtle energy quantum physics research”, as featured in the embarrassment of loopy riches at to which Keith Simpson alerts us.
There, quantum wondrousness is invoked to sell “Energized 5D Sound CD’s” – which originated when “Norman McVea, PhD. of Oxygen Research Institute made a dramatic breakthrough in imprinting Life Energy Amplified fields and encoding them onto Audio Tapes and CD’s.” (Those will be quantum apostrophes tunnelling in from other sentences, we presume.) How a being trapped in four-dimensional Einsteinian space-time can tell whether the sounds are truly five-dimensional is left as an exercise for spiritually advanced readers.
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Simpson discovered Dr McVea’s work in the course of his stochastic web-enabled research into oxygen supplements. For as well as offering 5D “CD’s”, the good doctor offers Energized Oxygen Supplements that “feature colloidal suspension for 80 per cent improved absorption over regular supplements. All formulations are energetically vitalized for high vitality. They are synergistic in nature, and we have designed them to be taken as a group for optimum benefits.” That’s handy – the picture shows 13 of them, all suitable for synergistic co-consumption.
“The UK’s Parcelforce service will not carry various classes of goods, including “toxic and infectious substancves” such as “Arsenic, Beryllium…Hydrogen Solenoid”. Just how dangerous is this Hydrogen Solenoid, Chris Webster demands”
Who is the doctor? “Norman studied Gestalt Therapy and sensitivity training at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He further studied NLP with the co-founder John Grinder… He was Director of Research for est, an Educational Corporation.” There’s more. We salute his indefatigability in covering all “alternative” bases bar Eckankar (the cult that specialises in “past lives, dreams and soul travel”).
None of these practices, naturally, has anything to do with sales technique. So we blink and accept that Dr McVea believes every word of his own blurb.
CONCERNED about high-level nuclear waste? The US government’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) wants to allay your concerns, so it has made available online the design for an educational cardboard “Nuclear Waste Cube” at . It points out that “In the United States, one person’s share of high-level nuclear waste from nuclear powerplants for a 20-year period could be placed inside the cube.”
Keen to be calmed, the folks at decided to make one. But now they are nervous again. The NRC gives the design of the cube but it doesn’t specify the dimensions. For all anyone knows, the cube could be the size of a house.
PUNCTUATION, we insisted recently, is important (6 May). But so too is the size of the gap you leave between two separate statements – or, in this case, film titles. Steve McGiffen recalls his student days at the Middlesex Polytechnic in north London in the 1970s. The local cinema was brave enough to show what were then considered daring “adult” films along with the usual family fare. Hence its marquee announcing two films that, because the space between them was not big enough, looked like one – England Made Me Hot and Naked.
NOT only do punctuation and space size matter. So, too, does the direction an arrow points in a textbook. Benjamin Pope is a student at Sydney Grammar School in New South Wales, Australia, and one of his textbooks is called GEOactive Stage 4: Global Geography. Having been taught that on a food web an arrow from one organism to another indicates that the first organism is eaten by the organism to which the arrow points, he was disconcerted when he spotted in his textbook a food web for Antarctica with the arrows reversed.
This implies, he says, that krill are capable of slaying blue whales, seals and, cleverest of all, birds in flight. How they achieve these feats is left to the reader’s imagination.
A TRAVELLING colleague of Feedback and a friend were surprised to find “alligator bites” on the menu in a north Toronto bar in Canada. Intrigued and a little shocked, our colleague’s companion asked the bartender: “You’re serving alligator fillets…aren’t they endangered?” Her reply: “No. They’re deep fried.”
So that’s all right then.
FINALLY, John Lennie in California was understandably perplexed when he received this from his local registrar of Democratic voters: “This is an official notice that due to a clerical error, the candidates for Member, County Central Committee, 14th Assembly District, Democratic, are in the incorrect random order on the ballot for the June 6, 2006, Direct Primary Election. The correct random order for this contest should be as follows…”