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Enough alarmism about ‘green terror’, breaking into research laboratories
and burning down furriers, and so forth. Everything will soon be under control.
Arch-Reaganaut James Watt, the man who made himself famous as US Secretary
of the Interior by declaring that trees cause pollution, seems ready to
lead the backlash, according to a report in Outside, a magazine based in
Chicago.

Speaking in Wyoming to a sell-out dinner organised earlier this year
by the Green River Cattlemen’s Association, Watts declaimed that: ‘If the
troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the
ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.’

* * *

The UN Conference on Environment and Development, called UNCED if you
are a UN-ese speaker and the Earth Summit if you aren’t, is to take place
amid much rhetoric and probably even more street crime in Rio de Janeiro
next year. Its sister organisation, the UN Environment Programme, has just
helped to publish a guide to UNCED. The two bodies are not on the best of
terms, and the guide won’t help matters. It says, on page one of the report:
‘UNCED aims to reverse the current decline in environmental deterioration.’

* * *

It’s called making the best of a bad job. New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ recently received
a three-page fax from the press office of the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico, trumpeting its latest breakthrough. Something called the
Molybdenum-Technetium Solar Neutrino Experiment has found ‘five and one-half
times the number of neutrinos predicted by the standard solar theory’. Cries
of ‘hold the front page’ rang round the office. After all, every other solar
neutrino experiment finds less than half the number predicted by theory
– that’s the famous solar neutrino puzzle.

But we read on. The high result was due to ‘chemical residue left in
the roasting apparatus’. In other words, the experiment tells us nothing
new at all about the Sun. It is what we on this side of the ocean would
call a cock-up. But is the team daunted? Not a bit of it: ‘Without the problem
of roaster memory the experiment would be a valid test of standard solar
theory.’ Problems are such a problem, aren’t they?

* * *

The old adage about statistics proving anything you want them to still
holds good. Sir Bob Reid, boss of British Rail, recently rebuffed criticism
of Britain’s railway system by quoting the tiny percentage of complaining
customers. We thought we must have misheard him, so checked.

BR, Sir Bob in person explains, is ‘committed to achieving major quality
objectives . . . to provide reliable and attractive services’. It carries
760 million passengers a year on 15 000 daily train services. Of these only
8000 complained last year. That is indeed a tiny percentage – almost invisible,
indeed.

But surely more than 22 people a day moan at British Rail every year?
Now read the small print. The number he quotes comes from the Central Transport
Users’ Consultative Committee, which collates ‘representations’ made to
the regional TUCCs.

We wonder how many passengers realise that if their train is late or
does not run, or there is no hot food, or BR’s new trains prove unable to
cope with the wrong kind of snow or those unexpected autumnal leaves on
the line, their complaint will only get logged by Reid if it went via a
TUCC.

Come to think of it, how many passengers know what a TUCC is and where
to find it?

* * *

In America, a country of car phones, phone pornography, Dial-a-Prayer
and shopping by phone, medical advice is now being dispensed ‘on the horn’,
as they say. The latest item of phonography, however, treads where American
television, billboards and the print media daren’t venture: the intricacies
of the condom.

Call a hotline (‘No one is forced to call,’ the hotline’s creator Stephen
Fuchs says reassuringly in AIDS Weekly) and you can listen to a lecture
on condoms. It’s all business. ‘We are not talking about birth control,’
states an authoritative recorded voice, ‘we are talking about disease control.’
There are data: ‘Last year, 10 million people were infected with a sexually
transmitted disease.’ There is prose: ‘AIDS is the loaded bullet in the
revolver of sexually transmitted disease.’ There is advice on where to buy
condoms, how to store them, when to use them (always), and how many times
you can use one (once).

For the uninitiated or inexperienced, our adviser outlines the proper
placement and removal of the condom and what to do if one breaks before
its mission is complete. The talk lasts 10 minutes. By then, of course,
the need for a condom might well have disappeared.

* * *

When the Three Valleys Water Company failed to chlorinate its supply
properly in July, the warning eventually reached London’s Heathrow Airport,
which is in the area affected.

Handwritten notices saying ‘Don’t drink the water’ were stuck up in
the public lavatories of this international airport. But only in English.
And yes, someone who didn’t understand English did drink, and was taken
ill. Tip for visitors to Britain: when you go abroad, don’t drink the water.

* * *

Thomson Consumer Electronics’s Research Laboratories in Strasbourg are
to be found in the new Parc d’Innovation just outside town. These are the
labs where Thomson does all its work on scrambling video and TV signals.
The scrambling system relies for security on computer codes, which makes
the street name rather apt: Les Algorithimes.