Reverend spooner
bent spoon arcs back ceaselessly towards its own handle, Feedback finds itself magnetically drawn to international man of cutlery Uri Geller. He has graced our pages on numerous occasions since he first rose to prominence, most recently (20 April 2019) when he claimed to be able to influence the UK’s Brexit negotiations conducted by Theresa May’s government.
Those particular interventions proved about as useful as a gelatin spork, but that hasn’t stopped him seeking out the limelight once again. After Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings posted a job advert looking for “assorted weirdos” earlier this year, Geller has put himself forward as the ideal candidate. In an interview with Reuters, he said that he is probably the only prospective applicant with genuine telekinetic powers. Good guess, Uri – but your numbers are off by one.
Seacret agents
nuclear weapon capabilities is much debated. But amid the geopolitical brinkmanship of the past few weeks, Feedback is grateful to for identifying the country’s real super-weapon.
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Per the publication, at around the turn of the millennium, Iran acquired a number of military dolphins from Russia, some of which – assuming low attrition rates for flipper-to-flipper combat – could still be alive. Menacing though the fleet of “communist killer dolphins” envisaged in the article may be, there is no doubt they represent a cuddlier alternative to a third world war. The most sickening aspect of war, it is often said, is that it has no porpoise.
Presidential dropout
from politics in the 2010s, Feedback would like someone to tell us what it was. Well, maybe that’s too harsh. We could, at a pinch, concede that the number of unexpected political results has taught us a valuable lesson about the unpredictability of elections, and that a much-ridiculed political candidate with a habit for odd tweets can still, somehow, be elected president.
It is with an abundance of relief, therefore, that Feedback notes that spiritual adviser Marianne Williamson has abandoned the race for the US Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination. Williamson, we should remind our less ardently political readers, was the candidate so widely disparaged in the mainstream press as – in her words – a “crystal woo-woo lady” that she felt obliged to state: “I’ve never had a crystal, I’ve never written about crystals. I’ve never talked about crystals. I’ve never had a crystal on stage with me.”
This may well be true. But she is also the candidate who tweeted: “Let’s see angels surrounding the nuclear reactors, pouring cold water over them, keeping radiation from escaping into the atmosphere” of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and that “A new moon eclipse in Pisces tonight means huge cosmic forces make enlightened dreams come true. Just saying’:)”.
Let’s just say that if she did have a crystal on stage with her, we would have happily voted for it over her. Just saying’:)
Some watcher of the skies
affect a person’s self-esteem, presenting them with a highlight reel of everybody else’s life while skating over the difficulties. That’s a gross overgeneralisation: regular media can do that, too. Take the story covered in The Times last week of 17-year-old Wolf Cukier. On his third day at an internship with NASA, he discovered a previously unknown exoplanet, now named TOI-1338b.
That feels like a personal attack, doesn’t it? His third day. Feedback has been diligently coming into work every day for decades, and the only planet we have successfully identified is the one we are sitting on.
Our inner cynic eagerly sniffs out conspiracy. Perhaps the engineers at NASA deliberately avoid some low-hanging planetary fruit in order to reward their interns, just as truffle farmers supposedly seed their fields to keep the pigs hungry.
Alternatively, of course, NASA could just be particularly good at identifying the best and brightest young minds in the solar system. Feedback, on the other hand, is still wondering where that is.
Twitter snowstorm
, it can sometimes feel as though certain politicians are living on a different planet. So the Twittersphere wasn’t entirely surprised to find that the Trump administration had tweeted a photo celebrating the “first snow of the year!” on a day when highs in Washington DC exceeded 20°C.
What was going on? Elaborate photoshopping in the service of climate change denial? An unexplained microclimate surrounding 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Or yet another attempt to troll the liberal snowflakes who supposedly populate the internet?
A detailed examination by Newsweek revealed that the White House had simply used a photo taken a week earlier on 7 January, the actual date of the first snowfall of 2020.
An easy enough mistake to make, though perhaps the administration should consider buying whoever runs their social media feed a window.
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